Ever since I graduated high school and moved away from my family, I have had a couple of recurring themes in my nightmares and in my dreams. The most common one is that I'm living in my hometown and I'm trying to find a way out. Sometimes I'm living with my parents, sometimes I'm living in my own apartment. I look for my car and can't find it (now that I don't have a car anymore, there is always a vague confusion at the back of my mind in the dream). I try to find a bus that will take me away. I beg my parents to give me a ride. Often, I have a feeling that I don't live there but I can't remember where I do live. Most times I wake up from these dreams and look around at my bedroom and feel an enormous amount of relief.
The other recurring theme is that I'm back in high school because someone looked at my records and found some error, and that I hadn't earned enough credits to graduate. So I'm always trying to find my locker or my classes. The high school rarely looks like the one I actually attended, it's usually a huge building with strange staircases or elevators that only go to certain floors. The odd thing is that the one thing that is exactly the same is that my locker is in the far northwest corner of the building on the top floor. Once in awhile I manage to find my locker, but someone has broken into it and almost everything is gone except for a few loose papers. Sometimes I will find one of my classes but realize that somehow I've missed several days or even months and I don't understand what is going on. Usually at the end of these dreams, I realize that I'm going to have to start the semester over again and I feel hopeless.
I know that the most common one, the one where I am trapped in my hometown, is because I felt trapped there when I was a teenager. I also lived out on a farm, so I was just stuck there all the time until I got a car. I also felt trapped in school...I hated going because of the bullying, but I HAD to go. I did stay home sick as often as I could get away with it, and my freshman year I was lucky that my grades were good enough that they let me move on to sophmore year. If my grades had been lower, they could have kept me back a year because I had so many absences.
The other dream, the one where I'm back in high school, I think is because I still don't know how I managed as well as I did. My anorexia was really bad, my undiagnosed bipolar and insomnia kept getting worse, and I rarely did my homework. I did get some low grades, but I never failed a class. I honestly don't know how I managed to graduate! I even graduated in the top half of my class.
I wish there was a way that I could stop having these dreams/nightmares. I've talked about them in therapy in the past, and I think I have figured out what they mean, but I continue to have them. Sometimes I think it would be nice if I could afford to be hypnotized; maybe they could give the suggestion that I don't dream about those things again or something.
"To dream that you have to repeat high school, suggests that you are doubting your accomplishments and the goals that you have already completed. You feel that you may not be measuring up to the expectation of others. The dream may occur because some recent situation may have awakened old anxieties and insecurities."
~ from: http://www.dreammoods.com/
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