Lucid dreaming as a healing tool
Awareness in our dreams can help us increase our awareness while we’re awake
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When was the last time your dream deceived you?
For me, it was earlier this month. I dreamed that a friend I hadn’t talked to in a while was pregnant. Within the dream, she lived in a large white house with a green lawn. It was also formerly a fraternity house.
Each room of the house popped up in my dreamscape as if they were printed photographs. Most of the rooms looked the same except for a bedroom that looked striking familiar. It was my ex’s bedroom. Within the dream, I recalled sleeping over there countless times. Specifically, I remembered the built-in shelves within the white walls and keeping my phone there as it charged overnight. As more details unfolded, I started to panic.
The wild part is that this room was too elegant, too pretty to be real, especially for a frat house in a past life. The dream bedroom wasn’t much at all like the real messy bedroom my ex lived in. In the real version of the room, there wasn’t even a built-in shelf or any quirky fixtures, yet I was fully convinced I’d previously slept in this dream room a handful of times. None of the details in the dream held up to my memories in my waking life.
At one point in my life, I could’ve easily identified this as a dream just as it started — and maybe then, my emotional response might’ve been different.
Growing up, I was fascinated by dreams. As a young child, I had a recurring nightmare the night before every Halloween about a giant, malicious pumpkin eating me. Every year, I’d go to sleep knowing what fate was to come.
This recurring nightmare stopped happening when I was in middle school — or at least I stopped remembering if this nightmare recurred.
It wasn’t until I was 15 when I consciously started paying attention to my dreams again. Around this time, I started my first ever dream journal, documenting every miniscule detail I could recall. During my…
