Issue 109, September 2007
War wounds
©Jane Teresa Anderson, September 2007
If you’ve ever been scared to sleep because of recurring nightmares, spare a thought for people who suffer blow by blow action replays of traumatic life events in their dreams. This is often the case for war veterans, and is also common for police and rescue personnel who have not received effective trauma counselling following an event. Any horrific experience that leaves you with a legacy of post-traumatic stress may replay over and over again in your dreams, in increasing graphic detail.
But aren’t dreams symbolic? Yes, they are, but the sleeping mind will sometimes wander down avenues into specific memories and incorporate these into otherwise symbolic dreams. This often happens for memories that seem to be etched in shock, as if they’re frozen in time, not yet broken down and processed.
Perhaps you can already see a danger here. If people can, and do, revisit past traumas in accurate replay in their dreams, does this mean we should look at other horrific but feasible recurring dream scenarios as possible repressed memories? Could it be that some experiences are so terrible that we forget them consciously but revisit them intact in our dreams?
Theoretically, yes, but before getting freaked out take a deep breath and remember this: horrific dreams involving murder, death, accidents, torture, mutilation and rape are extremely common and entirely symbolic. (If you are new to dream interpretation, use the Google on our website to search for more information on these kinds of dreams and their meanings. Remember to check the box for ‘search dream.net.au only’.) Dreams such as these are the dreams of sane people dealing with the emotional challenges of personal growth. They are dreams about coming to terms with change, and finding ways to transform pain and hurt into understanding and wisdom.
So it’s really important that before we look at ways of putting an end to the kinds of action replay dreams some war veterans and other traumatised people suffer, we affirm that we’re talking about dreaming of experiences that are firmly etched in the dreamer’s conscious memory. The dreams may add extra vivid touches such as intensified colours, sounds, emotions, facial expressions and the dreamer’s audible heartbeat. As with any dream involving fear, adrenalin will course through the dreamer’s body causing all the normal adrenalin responses such as sweating, freezing, and quickened heart rate, but the difference between this dream and a symbolic nightmare is that the dreamer knows about the waking life experience being replayed in the dreams.
A decade or so ago, some therapists believed that some horrific dreams were blow by blow accounts of actual events that the dreamer had repressed. Even though, awake, the dreamer still did not remember any waking life corollary, they were frequently persuaded that there was a possibility that their dreamed event was a repressed reality. In some cases dreamers (or people who had experienced similar scenarios while under hypnosis or in a dreamlike state of altered consciousness) accused family members of the dreamed abuses, sometimes taking their accusations through the legal system.
As a dream analyst privileged to hear many thousands of dreams, my feeling is that incidences of dreaming action replays of repressed memories are negligible compared to the vast array of equally horrific symbolic dreams that we all experience as a normal and natural part of our being. If you ever think you have touched upon a blow by blow account of a repressed memory in a dream, my advice is to interpret your dream as symbolic. When your dream is interpreted correctly, you will recognise how it relates to your life today, and, in doing this, realise that it was, indeed, a symbolic dream.
It’s also vital to remember that the more usual way of processing trauma is to dream about it symbolically. Symbolic dreams (not literal dreams) are our normal way of processing our waking life experiences, good, bad, indifferent and traumatic. Accurately interpreted, dreams reflect your experiences and the beliefs you have built based on those experiences. Through accurate dream interpretation you can approach past trauma safely by working with symbols, gently exploring the way your mind has coped with, or not coped with a trauma, gently observing how your coping mechanisms are impacting your life, and, most importantly, gently transforming those coping mechanisms into more effective ones that help you find peace and move forward freely.
Let’s now return to the case of war veterans or other traumatised people experiencing regular and accurate action dream replays of traumas they remember all too well from their past. Is there a way to stop these replays?
The key to stopping the action replay is to train (or program) the dreaming mind to change the dream. The quest is to re-vision the horrific dream into a more healing vision, and to replay this, while awake, many times. The more you do this, the more you increase the chances that the memory, when accessed during a dream, will play the new, more healing version. It’s not about changing the event: it’s about changing your response to the event and adding a healing component. Here’s an example.
Let’s say the memory replayed in your dream is of a plane you were piloting crashing to the ground, an accident of war that you survived while your crew perished around you. You can’t change the facts that you were the pilot of the plane, that the plane crashed, or that your crew perished. You can re-vision the memory to see your crew transforming into angels who send you loving telepathic messages that this was meant to be and that all is well. Have this happen from the moment the plane is hit, and let the new dream end there, as you farewell your crew and know that you will live to bring love to others. Have the re-visioned dream end as you see yourself in present-day, overflowing with love to give.
How you re-vision your memory is up to you. If you have carried feelings of guilt, build self-forgiveness into your healing version. You can add forgiveness for others, gratitude for others, interludes for saying goodbye or for expressing love or for receiving love or forgiveness from someone involved in the original experience.
If you have difficulty with creating a re-vision, ask a friend or counsellor for help. Focus on transforming feelings of pain you have carried with you: transform guilt into forgiveness, grief into a joy for living that you can extend to other people, hatred into love, loss into finding something new to carry forward, anguish into peace.
Repeat your re-vision many times awake, even though this does mean beginning with the start of the painful memory each time. Each time you begin with the memory and re-vision it, you not only reprogram your memory, you also heal the pain.
The practical point of the exercise is to stop the dream replay. The added bonus is that you not only stop the dream replay, but you heal your pain too.
At first, you may still dream the original replay, but over time it will either fade (as the healed pain no longer needs to find expression in the dream) or it will play the re-vision version. If you do experience the original replay in a dream, do your re-vision immediately upon waking from the dream.
You would be wise to pay attention to your symbolic dreams, especially any recurring symbolic dreams you have, as interpreting these may help you to understand how the trauma has affected your life and how you can make appropriate changes. These dreams provide clues on healing too.
Therapists, friends and family may have advised you to put your past behind you so you can move forward. To put your past behind you, you need to find a way to let it rest in peace, and you can only do this by finding a way to heal the memory. If you try to bury your past without coming to terms with it, it will not rest in peace. It will unsettle your life and invade your dreams, symbolically or literally. Better to open the can of worms you buried, and make peace with their wriggling, than to have them thrashing and clanging their pain on the lid of their tin can coffin throughout your dreams.
Here’s to peace and peaceful sleep though re-vision.
(For more on the value of healing your past through your dreams, see last month’s Dream Sight, Psychedelic sunglasses.)
Jane Teresa Anderson
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