Natalia Snider is a certified dream practitioner living in Carbondale. She works with people’s dreams and imaginations to facilitate self-healing. Every month, she will analyze someone’s dream in The Sopris Sun. Anyone can submit a dream for personal analysis or inclusion in this column by visiting www.dreamhealings.com
Dream
I haven’t had any dreams in a while, because I’ve been using THC as a sleep aid a lot lately. Finally I had a dream one night, when I didn’t partake before bed, and it was horrifying. I dreamt that my whole family and I were at a resort and I got swept away in this huge tidal wave flood. I felt super anxious and fearful trying to save myself and everyone else from the water. And the most terrifying part was the water, because I don’t know how to swim. I was sure I would die but I woke up before that happened. Since then, all I’m having is nightmares when I do have dreams and I’m wondering why.
Interpretation
Cannabis is such an interesting sleep aid because the sleeper will catch up on deep sleep yet simultaneously deprive themselves of another kind of sleep that is just as necessary. Rapid eye movement, or REM, is the stage of sleep that happens right after deep sleep in a normal sleep cycle and is the stage of sleep where we have the majority of our dreams. The use of cannabis before bed will push the sleeper too quickly past REM, cycling them back into deep sleep for longer periods of time. This will leave the sleeper feeling rested, but with a haunting forgetfulness of their dream realm.
Although we don’t have scientific answers as to why we need to dream, we see the repercussions, proving its necessity, when dream flood happens. Dream flood is a high impact of dreams compressed into the small REM stage in an effort to catch up on lost dream time. A dream flood is what you are experiencing here, but let me dive into the specifics of your dream to better explain.
Your dream, and subsequent nightmares, indicate that when you weren’t dreaming you were suppressing and compounding the necessary release of unconscious stored emotions. This is evident from the water in your dream representing the emotional body. Your tidal wave is metaphorically a dream flood happening of these stored emotions. The significance of your family is primarily that the interactions with these people, singularly or as a whole, are where these unconscious emotions are stemming from.
Let me pause here and define what I mean by unconscious emotions: emotions that are exchanged or felt on a subtle level, usually attached to body language cues and therefore just as subliminal. We often are not aware we have picked up these emotional energies from someone or something and store them unconsciously as our own. These then get released in our dreams, as we are not conscious enough of them to release them when we are awake.
So what I am saying is that you have picked up and stored a lot of emotions unconsciously from multiple interactions with your family that are now flooding you in this dream. Now, the subsequent nightmares you are experiencing are more of the same.
Your subconscious is using the most of its time in REM to clean out all of the stored emotions that it doesn’t want you to be keeping in your body. Because these emotions you are ridding yourself of are often negative, they manifest themselves visually as nightmares in various forms. As well, the overwhelm of so many dreams at once can itself cause a chaotic feeling that then turns into a nightmare of its own.
Yet, the moral of this story is not that you will drown in your emotions like the dream may indicate. Keep faith that these will subside when your REM is caught up and your sleep cycles balance out with natural sleep. It’s like the snow that melts in spring, rising the rivers only momentarily.
Additionally, you can help move things along with practices like breath work, body shaking, or somatic body work. These practices can get what’s stuck out, keeping your subconscious hygiene up so that you can experience a happy dream flood — because those can be incredible.
Until then, it helps to understand that your nightmares are just you cleaning house and that all you must do is simply release them. Don’t hold on to them when you wake. Don’t beat yourself up for them or give them any weight. Kiss them goodbye as you surf their waves. Your subconscious is trying hard to help you reset and balance. Trust it to do its job.