Nightmares / However...

Nightmares

I have noticed over the last several years that I only get nightmares when I’m about to change something really big. When something really big is changing. I never had nightmares growing up, or none to really take note of, but in the last near-decade, I’ve had about 3 or 4, plus last night’s.

The first time it happened, I was still in therapy, and was able to process with her. I came to realize that, for me, my nightmares were like big boogeymen waving me away from the work I was doing. However, instead of being something that frightens me away from the path I’m on, I realized that if my subconscious is going to pull out all the stops and create a massive ‘hell dimension’ for me, then I must be doing something right. I must be on the right track toward health, and the scared part of my ego, my habits, my core fears must be truly shaking in their boots that I’m about to abandon or walk through a pattern that doesn’t serve me. I am about to shed whatever it is that’s blocking me from my highest good, and, altruistic though the nightmares’ goal is (to “keep me safe” by holding me back in a stagnant pattern), that pattern I'm working on is about to go.

For me, nightmares are actually a guidepost that I’m on the right path. And desperately terrifying though they are in the moment, and in the moments after I wake in a panic, like last night, I do know they are simply showing me that the work I’m doing is poignant and positive.

My brain can be a bit of a dick sometimes.

However…

To continue the thoughts from yesterday about discovering the necessity of wearing or having some kind of buffer between me and the untoward thoughts that come toward me as I walk in the world, there is a rub—and not the good kind.

The rub is that I also want to be seen, I also want to be attractive, I also want to be asked out. So, if I conclude that in order to be “safe” in the world, I have to put up a boundary between me and you, then that means that I’m deterring positive as well as negative attention.

And then I’m back to the thought of being “the undefended self,” a book I’ve heard the title of, and am loathe to pick up (yet).

How to walk in the world with enough self-ownership that I don’t feel corroded by the lascivious thoughts of some, but attract the interest of others?

I mean, surely, we all know, (well, for me this is true) – physical attraction means a lot on first impression. But, if I’m walking with some kind of “you can’t touch me” attitude, then the guys who I may want to touch me will get that message too.

I don’t know the answer yet. I think much of it will lie in the work I’m doing and starting to do that caused my nightmare in the first place—around healing my relationship with sex, sexuality, and trust. I probably don’t know the answer yet, because I’m trying to divine it out of the same information and pattern I’ve always had and used. 

There’s a phrase I’ve heard: “You can’t fix a broken brain with a broken brain.” And extreme and diagnostically critical as that notion may be…

My brain can be a bit of a dick sometimes.