transabled.org

I’ve found it’s not useful for others to try to interpret my dreams, but rather for me to decide what I think the dream was telling me. So much of dreaming seems to be emotion and ambiguous feelings rather than the imagery itself. It seems you’ve done a fine job of figuring out what your brain was trying to tell itself.

Your post got me thinking about dreams I’ve had, and I recalled one I had a few months ago. I dreamed that I had parked in a disability parking space without realizing it. When I came out of the store (able bodied, I had been fined much more than my life savings. I was so angry at myself for making such a huge mistake and the world for having such draconian rules. I was now destitute and thrown out on the street, and was indentured for many years to pay it back.

Even though the dream itself was terrible and frightening, when I woke up I had to laugh. It’s a striking metaphor for my life – though I didn’t mean for it to happen, I find myself “parked” in the wrong body, and this is my great burden to bear.

Sometimes it is helpful to let other people try to help interpret your dreams because they can see things in an objective manner. Sometimes you don’t see things that are obvious because you are too close to them and have a biased perspective, especially since dreams sometimes reveal thoughts that we repress when we are awake – there’s a reason why we are repressing them. For similar reasons, people sometimes go to counselors or psychotherapists for help with personal problems – they need the advice of a disinterested party.

The meanings of your dreams, are however, unique to you, so your own feelings and experiences do need to be part of the interpretation.

FYI, since sleeping pills reduce the amount of REM sleep, when you reduce the amount you take stop taking them, you go into REM rebound, trying to make up the REM sleep that you’ve lost, which is why you have lots of nightmares and vivid dreams. Once your body adjusts to the lack of sleeping pills, your REM sleep should level off.

However, people who suffer from depression also tend to have more REM sleep.

Dreams…

What we can read is not your dream, but a text about what you remembered of your dream. And everybody who reads it will get a slightly different impression and come to think different thoughts about it.

And there are dreams which can tell us something and others which do not.

There are some possible views of your text which I would like to try out:

(1) You are paralyzed AND still have a mess around you. So the mess doesn’t vanish once you’re paralyzed? It might be independent of BIID then.

(2) There’s a sargeant-like person who shouts at you to bring your things in order. And you are not in your own home, but in something like a gymnasium.
So even with paralysis, you would NOT feel or be really free (in your dream), but in contrary: you would be under control and be dealt with disresepect like in the military.
Do you feel you are free now? Or is freedom a heavy burden?

(3) Why is order so important, what does the “dirty laundry” stand for? Why do you have the feeling there is so much of it?

You said that your life is bullocks. Why? A therapist would ask: Why not first try to change everything ELSE you can change in your life and see how you feel then – before you get an irreversible impairment? Or do you just feel you SHOULD change your life, have more order in it, do your laundry etc., because somebody expects it, because “one” has to?

Or the dirty laundry has to be removed because it symbolizes your “dirty” side, which is not dirty at all, and not a problem at all, but which we all have been taught to regard as dirty, dark and forbidden? And with being paralyzed you can clean it up – because the parts of your body where this “dirty laundry” (just as examples: sexuality, the wish to leave somebody, etc.) is located finally is paralyzed and “gone”, no more danger to the image of a clean and reliable and “respectable” person?

These are all only questions, even though sometimes the question marks are missing. Just speculation, but maybe worth thinking them through.

I came to them because I had a dream last week, too, another dream I might make my first “own” post here about…?

Best wishes
Phil

Is “bollocks” good or bad?

Brice. I think ‘bollocks’ is bad in this context.

Sean. You’re worrying me more and more. In what way have you made a dog’s breakfast of you life? I assume it’s not just because your legs still work.

I don’t know what other underlying problems there are but maybe you should change jobs or move somewhere else. It’s all very well doing the laundry and clearing up but they’ll be even more shit to shovel tomorrow.

I don’t think becoming a successful wannabe is going to help a lot with all the underlying problems but the motivation will be tremendous.

This brings me back to my philosophy ‘You can have anything you want as long as you really want it and believe you will have it’. Once one starts thinking positively there’s no place for depression and bad dreams. Everything follows – even the laundry!

It’s a word I never came across before. Who was it said “Britain and America are countries divided by a common language”? Apparently Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, etc. also.

it was Churchill I believe.

I want to answer some of these comments, but will do so a bit later.

‘Bollocks’(UK English Slang from Anglo Saxon):

Literally ‘testicles’.
Figuratively ‘rubbish’, ‘nonsense’, eg. ‘a load of bollocks’.