Hello all,
My name is Adam. Just joined here. On three or four occasions I have become spontaneously lucid, and I am hoping to live my life in a way that I can to turn this into a conscious process.
Something has been severely bothering me in my life and I will just go right into it. It’s a bit of a long story. Read if you wish.
Today I was thinking about how strange it is that my girlfriend never shows up in my dreams. She left me over three years ago. After having time to reflect, I recognize that I behaved selfishly and deceitfully toward her during the course of our relationship, so I can not blame anybody else but myself for its deterioration. Now I am focused on making amends. I have not reached out to her because it’s not for me to decide whether she will forgive me or not. Rather, I am simply focused on not behaving that way anymore. Also I’m trying to focus my energies into writing a novel, so that before I leave this body I can at least leave behind an expression of creativity that she would be proud of.
The relationship made a deep impact on me. We were together for only a year and a half, but it was the only time in my life that I felt content and free, at least before my destructive behaviors surfaced and began to sabotage things. When she left me I had moved across the country to start a job in a new city. So every day of the week from 8-5 I put on a ‘mask’ in the office, and over the weekends I had intermittent fits of uncontrolled sobbing. Instead of properly processing the loss, I fell into a drug addiction that has lasted until now. Today I am on my fourth week of recovery. I relapsed yesterday and today but I’m trying not to get too down on myself about it.
So, I have this essentially unprocessed loss of a relationship within me. Temporally I am so far removed from the event that I can’t touch it with my waking consciousness, especially after having numbed my emotions so consistently through drug abuse. One would think that this would be something that often pops up in my subconscious, but it almost never does. In an attempt to ‘induce’ dreaming of her, I have intensely focused on memories of her, on how I felt when we were together, but they are very vague. One time she did show up in my dream, she was walking past me, distracted by her smart phone, and she only glanced up and gave a casual greeting as if she didn’t recognize me. I was not lucid, and I didn’t go after her. In another dream I was sitting in a tower doing some kind of menial customer service work, and had a vague awareness that she was sitting in a tower a little distance away from me, but again I failed to interact with her.
What does show up in my dreams, nearly every night, is one or both of my parents. My parents were abusive to me all my life, and still behave abusively whenever I see them, even when I contacted them in an attempt to mend things. In my dreams they continue to behave toward me in the same way they did in my childhood: trying to make me feel ashamed, pestering me, giving me hateful looks, and other such general toxic behavior. Though I have a relatively decent handle on my anger in waking consciousness, when this happens in my dreams I revert to childish behaviors. Sometimes my dream self screams at them in a rage, or I angrily attempt to explain to them why their behavior is sick. Either way I am poisoning myself and removing myself from my underlying sense of tranquility.
The presence of my parents is without a doubt my most common dream sign. Yet why can I not become lucid when I see them? I feel sick every time they show up. Does the subconscious need me to process this first, before I can move on to the girlfriend issue? How shall I keep my calm rather than behaving in such a purely reactive way? If I manage to become lucid next time I see one of my projections of my parents, shall I simply ask them what their problem is with me?
I’m just sick of living like this, never getting any peace during the night, and always waking up in a horrible mood. I feel I need to bring awareness into every moment of my waking life, so that this can translate into my sleep.
