I had a nightmare in the wee hours of the morning a few days ago, that my house got broken into again. The dream was vivid enough that it was basically like re-living the whole thing.
Some things were different and wacky in ways that only make sense in dreams. Like…
… my house wasn't my house now, but the house I lived in until 7th grade. But in the dream I was living there, as an adult.
… the house next door was the same house next door growing up, but the person who lived there in the dream was the neighbor I have now. (It was the same neighbor who, in real life, called the police when my house got broken into.)
The dream happened like this:
When I got home I could tell someone was still in my house! So, I went over to my neighbor's house. Instead of calling the cops we went into my house. We confronted the guy, which was pretty scary, but as a result the thief did get caught at least (UNLIKE in real life!!)
Another weird thing was that the guy who robbed my house in my dream was the regular UPS guy who delivers packages to us at work. He really seems like a very nice person and I have no idea why I would dream that he was robbing my house! The logic in the dream was that any time I have packages delivered to work, it has both my work and home address on the package (which it doesn't have both in real life), so the UPS guy knows my home address and knows when I'm not home so he figured my house would be an easy target.
After waking up in the wee hours of the morning from this fright, I was very glad to find out it was just a dream. Yet every time I would drift back off to sleep I would slip into the same, terrifying dream. So when I did wake up I'd try not to go back to sleep so I wouldn't experience the ordeal anymore. Nevertheless, I was tired and had only slept a couple of hours up to this point, so I couldn't help drifting back to sleep. That kind of intermittent sleep for half the night certainly does not make for a good night's sleep. .
I wonder when this experience will stop tormenting my sleep.
1 comment:
I read an article recently that suggested that dreams are the brain's way of rehearsing "what if" scenarios, to make you better prepared to deal with them in real life. I couldn't find the actual article, but the idea is mentioned on wikipedia (near the bottom of the page): http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dream_interpretation
"Prof Antti Revonsuo (Turku university, Finland) has limited his ideas to those of ‘threat rehearsal’, where dreams exercise our primary self-defence instincts... once a dreamer has experienced a threat in a dream (either to self or a family member), his ability to confront and overcome a real life threat is then enhanced, so that such dreams, in both humans or animals, are an aid to survival."
So, it may help to think about your nightmares from that perspective -- your brain is trying to help you be better prepared to deal with the situation if it happens again. It's just trying to help. :-)
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