Scared Happy
What We Watch and Read Really Can Change Our Dreams
I love stories about the spirits. I click enthusiastically on anything that pops up about grieving, near death experiences, ghosts, angel visitations, mystic revelations, and the like. I find it comforting, encouraging, and just plain fun.
Last week I came across a story by an author who goes by the pen name of Ethereal Being. In her article about “Signs Spirit Is Trying to Get Your Attention”, she discusses how “It’s important to know that spirits, dead or alive, can reach out to you.”
(Cue the sound of a record scratch — a really LOUD record scratch!)
Living? Oh boy. The remainder of the article becomes a survivor’s nightmare. Although she gives lovely examples of dreaming about friends, then reaching out and finding that they truly needed some love in that moment, there is another side to the spirit visitation coin if we’re going to go down the path of including living spirits in our dialog.
How many trauma survivors dream every night of their abusers? How many fall asleep to find that their happy lives now are but a blissful fiction — and when they sleep, they return to the reality of their torment? Are those the spirits of their abusers come to visit? Does that mean that you can never truly break free from your past? Will the abuser always have control, even once you’ve been brave enough to walk away?
This really bothered me. It seemed unjust, unfair. It made me tired, yet afraid to fall asleep.
Amazingly, every night since I read that article I have dreamed of a different dead person. I have dreamed of birthday parties, shish-kabobs, cookies and music and banal conversation, yet each night has been a delightful and happy trip down memory lane with someone from the past who was dear to me. Happy people from happy times.
It is a well-known fact that what we watch on TV and what we read can affect our sleep patterns. This story obviously touched me so deeply that it affected mine. I’m sure this pattern of dreaming of those who have passed on won’t last forever, but it’s been a delightful change of pace that I am grateful for.
If the spirits have stepped in and re-wired my brain so I no longer suffer from nightmares, I am happy. I am thankful. I will gratefully sleep in peace.
