Scared to go to sleep after terrifying dream

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thedreamthatwasnt
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Scared to go to sleep after terrifying dream

Post by thedreamthatwasnt » Sun Apr 27, 2014 8:00 pm

I hope someone can help me to udnerstand what this dream means and why it was so frightening.
In this dream which seemed to not be a dream, I was climbing the stairs in my house. It was my house and yet not my house and I was confused and scared, nothing was the way it was supposed to be, wrong arrangements, wrong furnishings, wrong colors. As I climbed and approached my bedroom I felt more and more afraid and filled with dread. I did not realize I was dreaming which I usually do even during a nightmare.
I entered the bedroom, stood at the foot of my bed and saw myself and my husband sleeping in our bed. This sounds so innocous but it was terrifying for some reason which I can't understand and even thinking about it makes my hair stand on end. At the foot of the bed was a chest, which i do not have anywhere in the house in reality. On top was a big white stuffed animal and it began to mve and speak to me, causing me to finally scream in terror which woke me up. As I woke I only felt even more confused about where/when I was.
To my waking ears it sounds almost funny but just recalling it fills me with fear and dread and I'm actually scared to go to sleep.

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Re: Scared to go to sleep after terrifying dream

Post by eye_of_tiger » Mon Apr 28, 2014 12:05 am

thedreamthatwasnt wrote:I hope someis mire ae can help me to udnerstand what this dream means and why it was so frightening.
In this dream which seemed to not be a dream, I was climbing the stairs in my house. It was my house and yet not my house and I was confused and scared, nothing was the way it was supposed to be, wrong arrangements, wrong furnishings, wrong colors. As I climbed and approached my bedroom I felt more and more afraid and filled with dread. I did not realize I was dreaming which I usually do even during a nightmare.
I entered the bedroom, stood at the foot of my bed and saw myself and my husband sleeping in our bed. This sounds so innocous but it was terrifying for some reason which I can't understand and even thinking about it makes my hair stand on end. At the foot of the bed was a chest, which i do not have anywhere in the house in reality. On top was a big white stuffed animal and it began to mve and speak to me, causing me to finally scream in terror which woke me up. As I woke I only felt even more confused about where/when I was.
To my waking ears it sounds almost funny but just recalling it fills me with fear and dread and I'm actually scared to go to sleep.
Hi,

Up until the part where the white stuffed animal began talking to you this was sounding very much like an OOBE or Out Of Body Experience. The contents of your home being similar to reality but in so many ways slightly different, as well as viewing both yourself and your husband asleep in bed make me wonder if this was in fact a dream at all. You suggested that it did not feel like any typical dream or indeed nightmare that you had ever experienced in the past and this could be the reason.

Dreaming of stuffed animals talking or not talking is thought to mean that you are holding onto childish dreams and wishes, instead of learning to deal with life's challenges in a mature and active manner. You may not be accepting your own responsibilities in creating a better future for you and your partner, and are unhealthily instead escaping into childish fantasies and so called "magical thinking".

Magical thinking replaces reality with a children's story book version where virtually anything is possible if you only believe that it is, and it is not necessary to make an effort to help oneself because some magical spell or mythical creature can intervene on your behalf if you only wish for it to hard enough.

The feeling of dread and extreme fear are actually a response to the responsibility or responsibilities which you want to escape from. The stuffed animal is only a symbol used by your inner dream director to both represent your inability and unwillingness to accept and learn to deal with your adult responsibilities, rather than you being scared if a stuffed toy.

The white stuffed toy being animated and talking to you suggests that your fears of accepting responsibility, presumably because you do not feel that you are good or strong enough to work with your responsibilities and could potentially fail have taken on a life of their own, making them that much more difficult to identify and treat without outside professional assistance.

The dream could be saying that you and your husband need to put your heads together to try to work out between you as to what responsibilities you are avoiding as a couple, and more importantly what of an active and positive manner you are going to do about it in order to once again make forward progress.

Hoping that this helps,

EoT

thedreamthatwasnt
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Re: Scared to go to sleep after terrifying dream

Post by thedreamthatwasnt » Tue Apr 29, 2014 1:01 pm

eye_of_tiger wrote:
thedreamthatwasnt wrote:I hope someis mire ae can help me to udnerstand what this dream means and why it was so frightening.
In this dream which seemed to not be a dream, I was climbing the stairs in my house. It was my house and yet not my house and I was confused and scared, nothing was the way it was supposed to be, wrong arrangements, wrong furnishings, wrong colors. As I climbed and approached my bedroom I felt more and more afraid and filled with dread. I did not realize I was dreaming which I usually do even during a nightmare.
I entered the bedroom, stood at the foot of my bed and saw myself and my husband sleeping in our bed. This sounds so innocous but it was terrifying for some reason which I can't understand and even thinking about it makes my hair stand on end. At the foot of the bed was a chest, which i do not have anywhere in the house in reality. On top was a big white stuffed animal and it began to mve and speak to me, causing me to finally scream in terror which woke me up. As I woke I only felt even more confused about where/when I was.
To my waking ears it sounds almost funny but just recalling it fills me with fear and dread and I'm actually scared to go to sleep.
Hi,

Up until the part where the white stuffed animal began talking to you this was sounding very much like an OOBE or Out Of Body Experience. The contents of your home being similar to reality but in so many ways slightly different, as well as viewing both yourself and your husband asleep in bed make me wonder if this was in fact a dream at all. You suggested that it did not feel like any typical dream or indeed nightmare that you had ever experienced in the past and this could be the reason.

Dreaming of stuffed animals talking or not talking is thought to mean that you are holding onto childish dreams and wishes, instead of learning to deal with life's challenges in a mature and active manner. You may not be accepting your own responsibilities in creating a better future for you and your partner, and are unhealthily instead escaping into childish fantasies and so called "magical thinking".

Magical thinking replaces reality with a children's story book version where virtually anything is possible if you only believe that it is, and it is not necessary to make an effort to help oneself because some magical spell or mythical creature can intervene on your behalf if you only wish for it to hard enough.

The feeling of dread and extreme fear are actually a response to the responsibility or responsibilities which you want to escape from. The stuffed animal is only a symbol used by your inner dream director to both represent your inability and unwillingness to accept and learn to deal with your adult responsibilities, rather than you being scared if a stuffed toy.

The white stuffed toy being animated and talking to you suggests that your fears of accepting responsibility, presumably because you do not feel that you are good or strong enough to work with your responsibilities and could potentially fail have taken on a life of their own, making them that much more difficult to identify and treat without outside professional assistance.

The dream could be saying that you and your husband need to put your heads together to try to work out between you as to what responsibilities you are avoiding as a couple, and more importantly what of an active and positive manner you are going to do about it in order to once again make forward progress.

Hoping that this helps,

EoT
Hello eye_of_tiger,
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and respond! I see in the guidelines that it is imortant to give feedback to readers and also I appreciate it so much that you tried to help! I will try although I am not very adept at interpreting dreams. I've been scared to sleep in my own bed the past few nights as this is not the first time I've had strange dreams which don't feel like dreams in this room but definitely the most disturbing one. What is an OOBE? Is this something I can learn how to stop from happening again?

I tend to be childish sometimes and I often fear to fail as you suggested but I didnt think it was such a strong fear, more the kind that all parents have . Maybe it was that but also a shift / change to make myself wake up.

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Post by eye_of_tiger » Wed Apr 30, 2014 12:29 am

Hello eye_of_tiger,
Thank you so much for taking the time to read and respond! I see in the guidelines that it is imortant to give feedback to readers and also I appreciate it so much that you tried to help! I will try although I am not very adept at interpreting dreams. I've been scared to sleep in my own bed the past few nights as this is not the first time I've had strange dreams which don't feel like dreams in this room but definitely the most disturbing one. What is an OOBE? Is this something I can learn how to stop from happening again?

I tend to be childish sometimes and I often fear to fail as you suggested but I didnt think it was such a strong fear, more the kind that all parents have . Maybe it was that but also a shift / change to make myself wake up.
Firstly you are very welcome for any assistance given. And thanking you in return for your helpful feedback. While I may have had more practice than you in giving dream interpretations to our members, these are only suggestions as to what your particular dream could possibly mean. The only "experts" in the often challenging field of dream interpretation are self appointed ones. This is mainly because our dreams are written in the sometimes unique language of our own unconscious mind, so what something might mean to your dreaming mind could potentially be very different to what the same dream symbol represents to my unconscious.

Look I do not want you to feel in any way embarrassed or childish for experiencing fear during these events. Fear is an important part of our human survival mechanism. A person who has no fear at all would not generally last very long. Courage is not the absence of fear, but rather it is not allowing your fears to control you to the extent that they prevent you from having a life worth living.

An Out Of Body Experience refers to a psychic event where it is believed that our consciousness is temporarily projected outside of our physical bodies. It is common for people undergoing this to observe their bodies from outside it as if they are observing somebody else with their normal physical eyes. Frequently there is a sense of freedom and great joy associated with this but the psychic shock of suddenly finding oneself temporarily apparently dissociated from their own body as well as the understandable fear that this could be a permanent arrangement and that it will be impossible to return to it can in some of us bring on one of our most intense primal fears as human beings.

It is also believed that these experiences are much more common than we previously thought that they were. Some researchers claim that it could happen on a nightly basis, although most of the time we do not remember anything about it on waking. I do not currently know of any suggested reliable method to stop this from happening or to stop you remembering that it has happened. Usually however the chance of it happening is caused by any factor which can disrupt our normal sleep pattern.

Anything potentially from making sudden changes to the time which we go to bed, ingesting certain substances shortly before settling down, being physically, mentally or emotionally ill, having a lot of extra worries on your mind, reading or watching on TV unsettling stories whether or not they are real, oversleeping or going back to bed when you should be getting up has been known to increase the number of reported OOBEs.

In some of us it may only appear to happen once in our entire lifetime (because we only remembered it once), while in those who are unfortunate enough and do not want it to happen, it could be a regular occurrence. If you could find out which of these factors is or are most important to your system in increasing the probability of an OOBE, you could possibly gain some more control over them happening to you again. Understood?

There is no way that either I or the sleep experts (which I am not) can determine if you are one of the unlucky ones (or the lucky ones if you want it to happen), other than perhaps studying your brain waves (certain patterns of brain waves are seen as indicators of the person having an OOBE) with you wired up to a machine in a dream laboratory, over an extended period of time. Definitely not by interpreting one isolated psychic event or dream.

In summary, the fear of finding oneself seemingly outside of his or her sleeping physical body and the overpowering fear of not being able to return to it are both very real and should never be minimised or made fun of, although there is no documented evidence of it ever having caused permanent harm to the individual, making them mentally ill as a result or killing them (physical death IS a permanent OOBE).

Learn to increasingly control both the fears as well as the chance of it happening again by experimenting with the factors some of which I described above, and see if that helps. And learning more about what it really is and why some people want it to happen to them would also be useful to you in calming your nerves, and in stopping you from being so afraid to fall asleep again.

A primal fear is programmed or hard wired into us at the moment of our birth presumably in order to ensure our survival (physical and psychological) over the longer term. The primal fear of having an unexpected OOBE can be controlled, but never entirely removed. The fear can be in some cases transferred to other seemingly unrelated dream elements such as for example a white, stuffed and talking child's toy.

With you I believe that the intense fear that you experienced when that menacing toy began taking to you was a combination of the residual fear from your OOBE which was probably over by then, as well as your inability or unwillingness to face adult responsibilities which it is felt you are avoiding having to confront and deal with in a mature and balanced manner.

The toy actually talking to you was only done for dramatic effect, and to help emphasise the critical importance of you confronting your fears and responsibilities in this way for your own future happiness and success in life, and in turn the future happiness and success of your husband in his life. As whatever we do or do not do affects in some way those people around us, and especially those who are closest to us. The future happiness and success of your relationship will be largely determined by your and your husband's happiness and successes in overcoming his or her own respective life's fears and challenges.

None of this is easy for me to to explain, or for you to have to put up with when it is happening to you or to someone whom you love. But first hand experience has shown me time and time again that achieving anything which is important to me in my life often requires considerable time, energy, patience and compassion for self on my part. Nobody expects us to do any more than the best which we are able with the resources that life gives us, so why do we expect any more than that from ourselves? I believe that in these ways the two of us have much in common with the rest of the human race.

Blessings in abundance upon your marriage,

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