Had one of the craziest dreams ever... And while I plan on sharing my whole collection since I started keep track in my dream journal at some point.. This one was just so crazy for me that I felt like sharing it now ahead of the others.
Photo credit = Sharon McCutcheon on Unsplash
Day 16
01/25/2019 clear outside and moon is in a Waning Gibbous Phase
Before sleep I asked how do I be the best version of myself.
In my dream I had a dog friend who may have been my childhood dog friend named Tara and I chased/followed her/him all over.
I continued dreaming on my own exploring massive mysterious structures.
Then somehow met up with Johnathan Sprague who I had a falling out with a while back and am no longer friends with.
I joked about him and his egotistical personality and he handled it well, after that we agreed to work together to try to solve a Free Mason mystery.
I think my good friend James was also there too as a male figure around my age that I trusted was with me.
Then my dream showed a scene of some young cheerleader girl who was a daughter of Free Masons and I woke up.
In my next dream I was out in the dry creek bed in front of my house with my brother Robin I think..
(And for a lil context.. For anyone who doesn't know and I don't talk about it very much cause I'm ashamed of it.. I have a pretty severe case of OCD where I don't like touching door handles or shaking hands with people or things like that, I'm especially grossed out by other peoples hairs and end up having to wash by hands a bunch cause some part of me feels like that helps make me more "clean" or whatever. I'm fucked up in the head in regards to that and it's not easy to tell anyone about it. Anyways moving on..)
I went over to an area where I had some of my items stored and dealt with a long white hair which I thought was my moms hair at first but then realized it was not even a hair, it still triggered my OCD though.
And then shortly afterwards she was laying down and put her feet on my dream journal which also triggered my OCD and bothered me.
After that I argued with my brother Robin a lil and then I was at a party with all of them and more people I didn't recognize.
I was in my old room with my other brother Jon and we were talking about all kinds of stuff and having a good back and forth about life. And.. My OCD kept being triggered in various ways in here as well as for some reason I thought it was still my room and I had trouble becoming comfortable with my brother and others sort of being in my personal space.
After that.. I went to another room and my mother brought one of the women with her that I fell the hardest for romantically in the past and who also hurt me the most in the way she treated me into the room I was in and tried to get me to talk to her.
It was awkward and weird. We were all three watching tv or a movie. Erin smiled at me a lil but I think she could tell I was pissed/unhappy.
Nothing was said that I could remember, it was very quiet. This was much better than the last time I dreamed about her though around a year ago where I just yelled at her and then stormed off into the hot desert sun in the wilderness, at least I didn't yell at her this time..
Eventually I said I was waking up and leaving cause I wanted to get out of there and woke up/left then appeared right back in the same dream and thought I was awake for some reason.. It was sort of like that inception movie even though I never saw that movie, but I still sorta know what it's about.. Dreams within dreams and such.
So I jumped off the front deck which is like 15ft high at night and ran down the street at night and realized how alone I was.. At first it was a terrible feeling but after I really woke up later and thought about it it felt like a beautiful feeling to me.. To be alone in the dark. It was nice.
When I was running down the street it almost felt like I was on all fours like a canine and my vision was getting lighter and darker sort of like a pulsing light bulb and when I got to the bridge that's up the street I woke up.
When I woke up.. I was just.. sort of in awe at how crazy the dream was and had to lay there trying to figure it out..
I then kept repeating.. "Higherself, Godself, dreamself, please send me back to that dream I feel there's more I need to learn there".
I went back to the dreamworld and it felt sort of like the same place and people and it was so lucid..
I didn't really recognize anyone though this time, but they recognized me..
They asked me if I knew where I was I and I either said no or Sedona Arizona and they said no that I was actually in New Orleans or something like that I forget exactly where!
They then asked if I knew who I was and said my name Paul Irvine and they seemed to acknowledge that was me and even showed me a picture of me and it looked exactly like me but it wasn't "me" and after that I tried to leave.
Some children followed me out into the city and I couldn't wake up, so I decided to head back to the house cause I figured I was suppose to find and talk to Erin.
On the way back I saw a small snake in the path and warned the kids to be careful.
Right after that a bigger snake that was hidden in a dark hole launched out and bit me.
I kept going to the house and then woke up when I got there.
This time I was too awake to try to go back to sleep and accepted that I would not be able to reconnect with that dream this time or maybe ever again.
The question I asked before I went to sleep was.. "How can I be the best version of my self?"
After thinking about it all.. I really think one of the major messages was to somehow solve my OCD, though I still have no idea how I can do that.. It's embedded so strong into my subconscious.
One of the other major messages was, it seemed like my dream was trying to get me to talk to Erin and sort of.. Make "peace".. However I dunno how I can do that either cause I don't want to talk to her.
She's been liking some of my posts after I liked one of hers that I saw in my feed which was a meaningful post so I supported it like I did the one where I saw in my feed that she quit smoking a while back and..
I have thought about trying to message her but she ignored me last time and ignored me so many times before that and treated me so disrespectfully and without concern for my well being that I just don't know how I could message her.
Last time I checked her page which was a long time ago she was engaged to some dude and for all I know she's probably married now and.. It just hurts too much to try to contact her.
I am at much more peace with that whole situation though and have forgiven her to a large extent, yet.. There's still something really strong there that still bothers me and is showing up in my subconscious and is also preventing me from wanting to try to talk to her.
Another message was the thing with Johnathan Sprague who is someone else that I had strife with in the past and I don't want to reach out or connect with him either for numerous reasons.
The other messages seem to be.. Me out exploring nature and trying to solve secret society mysteries and "snakes"... Ever since I was young snakes would strongly show up in my dreams and my mother used to say they represent life, so that could mean I need to overcome more of my fears about life.
When the snake bit me that seemed kind of meaningful.. Maybe that was life biting me.. I'm not sure.
This was by far the most crazy and intense and at times lucid feeling dream that I can remember in my adult life. Maybe I had inception sort of dreams when younger though in my adult life I can't remember any quite like that where I woke up and was still in the dream thinking I was awake..
Something different I did before bed this time was I unplugged the wireless WiFi connected to my computer and I put my phone in airplane mode and powered it down and put it in the corner of my room.
I also usually listen to music to help me sleep though recently saw a new article with a study or studies showing that silence is really important for us to heal and regenerate our brains and to give them a break/rest so I tried silence and I think it helped me dream better.
So I think it's possible the lack of music and EMF waves may have helped me dream even more powerfully and I'm looking forward to trying again tonight!
Anyways.. I think that's enough for now. Peace.
From your own internal (subjective) experience OCD arises as a phenomena, it is made. The making happens within a few fractions of a second. It seems to not have internal causes when perception of it comes after it forms. It "just happens to you." Causes are seen when perception watches OCD arising as a phenomena. There are "acts" of relating to arising, habits of relating, that are part of what makes it. An impulse comes up with little mental narrative, it is engaged with in some way, a meaning grows, which is engaged with again causing the meaning to grow more and seem intrinsic to the impulse.
i used to count under my breath when i was a kid, "one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... one, two, three, four, five, six, seven..." i find i can be compelled to seek attention, or compelled to anger. These things seem "just to happen to me." But when i look more closely i see an impulse rise up, i see that i relate to it in roughly one of three ways: either i grab it, i resist it, or i lean into it a little with a mild interest. Depending on which way i relate there is a predictable cascade of other internal "acts" like judgement, assigning meaning, and projecting, leaving me in the grips of full blown anger, for example. When i perceive an impulse arising in real time prior to the cascade it does not overwhelm and dictate to me. Further along the cascade i can only cope, through deep breathing for instance, or counting to ten. Even further along the cascade my behavior is being dictated by the previous chain of "acts." The original impulse can be something as quiet as "i want to be heard." It is an open question whether that quiet little voice is attempting to talk to the external world at all, or is in fact simply attempting to talk with me about my own relationship to it. It is an open question whether those little impulses are attempting to tell me anything about the external world at all, or are in fact simply attempting to tell me something about my internal world... Yet full blown anger tends to assume that it is about the world or some part of it, and so it assumes it is for the world, or some part of it. In any given case that may be an error.
Interesting.. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. So I assume you have some form or had some form of OCD as well?
I noticed mine going back to my childhood when I got my first pet ferret and had to make sure the door was either shut so it wouldn't escape or that there was a wall barrier in place and I would go back and check it over and over and over again cause I couldn't remember if I shut it.
I still do this today to an extent when it comes to locking the door to my room when I leave, like I have to check numerous times.. And I have a pretty good memory! It's weird... It's like.. It doesn't lock in and I question if I really did it.. I found many others with OCD have this same issue, however my OCD in regards to washing my hands didn't show up until.. I think around my 20's.. So while I've had signs of OCD since my young teens, it was mild compared to what I deal with now and I wish there was some kind of easy answer that could solve it though I've been thinking about it and watching YouTube videos and studying about it for a while now and haven't been able to solve it.
Some people claim to have cured their OCD and others claim that it is impossible to cure and that you can only sort of improve the condition and make it less worse.
Your idea of counting and examining the thoughts and judgments and conditions sounds interesting and I've heard similar before I think in a YouTube video, however.. I don't know how to convince myself that I don't need to wash my hands, or that I really did lock the door.. It's really a pain and I feel like it ruins my life sometimes, though in other ways I feel like there is a gift on the other side of most struggles, so.. I do feel like it has helped me be smarter and more intelligent in some ways and it's not all bad.. I just wish I could somehow overcome it so it stops preventing me from living how I want to live.
I appreciate you sharing your insight and I haven't forgot about our other conversation on veganism, I'm just extremely busy right now trying to get the IFC contest I run started and haven't had the time to respond to many comments and messages as much as I'd like. I will get back to it at some point just trying to prioritize at the moment and this message of yours was very interesting so I had to make the time to respond. Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and I will have to think more about what you said.
Directly speaking the reason you cannot remember whether or not you locked a door is because your attention has been grabbed by a felt worry, and there is only so much attention available at any given time. That fact is no different than an inability to read a book while driving for instance. Your attention simply isn't on the memory of you leaving a room, it is on the worry briefly, and then it is led along the activities developed to insulate that worry from a child who could not understand it . The worry is informing you about a conditioned sense of inadequacy which gets misattributed, and externalized. That habit begins to break up as soon as you see for yourself and engage with the pang of inadequacy, the felt impulse, as it emerges in real time.
Hmmm.. That makes a decent amount of sense. However I think in order to shift from the focus of worry to the focus I want, I have to figure out a way to want that more than the worry.. And the worry is so strong that it's difficult to logically think of the alternative, I think I'm like.. Having a battle within my mind in regards to what it wants more.. Part of me wants the comfort that comes with double checking or feeling clean and another part wants the freedom and health that comes with not having to do those things.
Last night I was thinking about trying to be more "funny" and less "serious".. Maybe if I could somehow get that positive energy connected with not checking the lock so much or washing the hands that would help.. Or if perhaps I could turn it into a funny joke that what I'm doing is so absurd and doesn't make sense, maybe the positivity from the laughter could help pull me more away from the comfort I get from feeling secure and clean... I dunno.. it's tough.. Thanks for trying to help me through it though I really appreciate it!
"I don't know how to convince myself that I don't need to wash my hands, or that I really did lock the door.."
If you observe the process of becoming convinced that you need to wash your hands, and the process of becoming uncertain whether you locked the door or not - perceive it, sense it, watch it somatically in real time - you unlearn your conviction, certainty, or "nagging doubt". The certainty that you need to wash your hands is the end point of a process happening in psychosomatic space; subjective space. That process takes time; it's not instantaneous even though it might seem to be. Because the process takes time it can be felt/sensed/perceived. That is not really any different than feeling that you are hungry for instance, it just takes more subtle attention because we're not used to observing processes that happen so quickly.
But If you try to convince yourself on the heels of a compulsion, after the fact of it, you will tend to suppress it and its causes, which makes it harder to perceive how it comes about in the first place. Sense the beginning glimmer of compulsion in real time and you unlearn it.
That's a lot of dreams to remember for one night. It seems that there were a lot of reoccurring themes to them such as your OCD and people from your past. I'm impressed that you are looking within yourself to try and determine the meaning behind them. I wonder if the lack of music and wifi did make dreaming easier for you as you suggested. The music being off at the very least seems like it would create less distraction and allow your mind to better focus.
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Indeed! I wonder if I dream that much every night and just don't remember most of it. There was much of that night I didn't remember in addition to that.. Really makes me wonder just how much myself and many others don't remember.
And yeah.. Definitely some recurring themes, they have been appearing in my other dreams as well, really makes me think there's some stuff I need to figure out.
Word.. I am impressed with myself as well considering I went through a strong phase of not wanting to dream for a long time. I'm glad I was able to get passed that cause I've been learning a lot!
I think the lack of music helped, I'm not sure about the WiFi yet.. Still not sure what to think about that science. Some people say the radiation from lightbulbs is worse and some say the WiFi is really bad and causes all sorts of issues.. So... I dunno.. Will be curious to see how these experiments keep unfolding in time!
We can have some crazy dreams sometimes that not only scares us but stays with us for a long time. Hope you are feeling more calm now.
What dreams us humans have!
Incredible post and good luck on this endeavor.
Steem on :)
I need to start having a dream journey, because I be having some amazing dreams that I wish I could remember 10min after waking up lol
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Sounds like it! I suggest you do. :) It's been very helpful for me in a lot of ways! Really surprising too in some ways.