Do You Pay Attention to Your Unconscious Mind?
Did you know that your nighttime dreams can give you clues about your life? Do you ever wake up and think about what your dreams might mean?
Sometimes it’s not what you think. Sometimes your mind is trying to get your attention and tell you something very important.
Dreaming is our unconscious mind’s way of processing everything that happens during our waking hours. Most people dream for about two hours every night. They can last between 5–20 minutes but most of them stay with us longer. Dreams can include images, ideas, emotions, and sensations from our conscious life. Everyone dreams at night, but we don’t always remember what they were when we wake up.
As a trauma survivor, my dreams are often fragmented and horrifying. I know why they keep returning because it’s my brain trying to figure out my past. If I’ve had a bad day, it’s followed by a nightmare, and I deal with them in therapy.
I don’t always have nightmares, and I have learnt to pay attention to my dreams — especially the good ones. I relish the mornings when I wake up with a warm glow in my body instead of feeling petrified with fear. Good dreams make for a nice transition into my day.
This is the life of someone living with Complex PTSD. There is usually so much negativity to overcome even before I get out of bed. These are the moments survivors don’t talk about: the transition between the unconscious and conscious mind.
Etymology (The origin of dreams)
In Old English, the word dream was used to describe “music” or “joy.” Initially, the word was unrelated to sleeping brain activities. Later on, in the 13th century, the word dream was used to describe a series of emotions, images, or thoughts that happened during sleep.
The Content Analysis of Dreams Study
Professor Calvin Springer Hall studied and collected 50,000 dream reports in 1966 at Western Reserve University, Ohio. He published The Content Analysis of Dreams with Robert Van de Castle, highlighting a coding system to study 1,000 dream reports of college students. The publication showed that people from different parts of the world had similar dreams. Hall’s studies of dreams revealed that the most common dream stems from anxiety. Other dreams covered a range of emotions such as anger, fear, abandonment, joy, and happiness. Interestingly, negative dreams were more prevalent than positive ones.
The imagery that we have in dreams of objects and locations often blends. They reflect our experiences and memories. Conversations in dreams can become exaggerated and morph into very strange situations. Stories can evolve into comprehensive worlds with new thoughts, ideas, and experiences that were never felt before. Hall’s complete dream reports were made available to the public by his protégé, William Dornhoff, in the mid-1990s. Hall’s work is still being cited today.
American author and psychologist Deirdre Barrett published a study after the COVID-19 pandemic. She used over 15,000 dream reports in her analysis, and they covered illness, fear, and death up to four times more than dreams before the pandemic.
The study of dreams is popular, and many articles have been written since Sigmund Freud, who founded psychoanalysis in the early 1900s.
I find the analysis of dreams fascinating because I can delve deeper into what my mind is telling me about myself.
Search for dream interpretation or dream Dictionary in your browser.
What do your dreams tell you about your life?
You might be surprised by your own brain.
My name is Lizzy. I’m a trauma survivor, a wife, a mom, a teacher, and an author.
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Here are a few links to my top articles:
How To Explain Complex PTSD To Loved Ones
https://medium.com/illumination/how-to-explain-complex-ptsd-to-loved-ones-769f81d437ab
A Search for Identity
https://medium.com/beyond-lines/a-search-for-identity-893df7c970c2
Dealing With Flashbacks
https://medium.com/illumination/dealing-with-flashbacks-1b8c0d94c19d
The Knock on the Door that Changed My World
https://medium.com/illumination/the-knock-on-the-door-that-changed-my-world-ff126c8c07cf
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For more about me: https://www.elizabethwoodsauthor.com
Elizabeth Woods grew up in a world of brutal sex offenders, murderers, and inconceivably neglectful adults. Elizabeth is passionate about spreading awareness of what it is like to survive after trauma. She is the author of several books and has written her memoir, telling her childhood story: The Sex-Offender’s Daughter: A True Story of Survival Against All Odds, available on Amazon Kindle and paperback.
Elizabeth is also the author of “Living with Complex PTSD” and the Cedar’s Port Fiction series: “Saving Joshua”, “Protecting Sarah”, “Guarding Noah” and “Bringing Back Faith,” and “Restoring Hope,” available here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/author/B0BCBZQN7L/allbooks?ingress=0&visitId=7e223b5b-1a29-45f0-ad9d-e9c8fdb59e9c&ref_=ap_rdr&ccs_id=931f96e2-c220-4765-acc8-cc99bb95e8bd
