July | In Your Dreams
A DREAM COLUMN
Welcome back to In Your Dreams, a monthly column where we try to make sense of the theater your brain puts on for you while you sleep. Let’s see what July’s dreamer has floating around their unconscious…
In my dream I’m walking along the side of a quiet country road and a dog comes out of the bushes, bites my arm, and runs away. My arm hurts but the scariest part is that as I keep walking, the area around the bite starts to turn black, and then the black slowly moves until my whole arm is black. I’m freaking out, but there’s no one on the road. Then suddenly a car comes along, and I psych myself up to wave it down for help, but as it passes, I don’t do anything. Even though my brain is screaming at me that my arm is going to fall off, I can’t will myself to attract their attention. I watch the car fly by without slowing down, and then I wake up. Um, am I okay?
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Are any of us okay, really? If someone figures out how to measure that, with science, let us know. But while we are not mental healthcare professionals, it’s within the bounds of common sense to say that if your unconscious is crafting metaphors for you like a stray dog biting your arm leading to a creeping black death, there’s not ~no~ cause for concern.
But let’s not jump to alarmist conclusions just yet. Let’s simplify the narrative of the dream to its most basic structure. What sort of story is your brain telling here? Well, it opens with a major inciting incident, one that would be quite violent in real life, though it doesn’t read particularly scary in your description. For you, the real terror comes after, when the infection starts to take over your arm in a dreadful way that’s giving us flashbacks to old episodes of Game of Thrones (iykyk).
The fallout is the thing here. It’s insidious, and you recognize it for the threat that it is—hard not to when you can watch its disfiguring ascent inch by inch—but when it comes time to act, to make a play to save yourself, you can’t. You freeze. No judgment to your dream self there. We’re all at the mercy of our nervous systems when it comes to traumatic events. When we feel threatened, there’s the first level physical response that most of us experience, symptoms like racing heart, quickened breathing, flop sweat. Anything that might happen to you if you watched a scary movie or got a text from your situationship that said “we need to talk.” That’s all hardwired from an eon of our ancestors surviving in the natural world. Your body is preparing to either fight the danger or flee from it, even though our modern threats are more like work presentations and politics than bears and quicksand.
YOUR DREAM? IT’S GIVING FREEZE, BABE.
The physical response usually comes in tandem with a behavioral one. There are four types of reactions: fight or flight (those two you know) or freeze or fawn (their lesser-known siblings). Your dream? It’s giving freeze, babe. Do you do that in real life too? If you gravitate toward playing possum in stressful situations, that’s a helpful thing to know about yourself. Is there an area of your life where you’re freezing on yourself now? Do you want to be taking action but can’t seem to? There’s often a lot of guilt and shame around the freeze response, and that can spiral into even more freezing.
If you feel stuck, psychologists recommend calming the nervous system. Exercise helps complete the stress cycle. You could also try cognitive behavioral therapy, breathwork, meditation, hobbies, volunteering, time in nature... There’s a long list of beneficial strategies merely a Google away that we could all benefit from, frankly, trauma or no.
Connecting with loved ones is one valuable tactic that we want to emphasize since you started the dream walking alone on a deserted country road. In today’s world, it’s easier than ever to isolate, even in a busy city, and we’re here with a gentle reminder that if you need to refresh your spirit, prioritize seeing your people.
If you’ve ever woken up from a dream like, ‘what the hell was that’ and would like to be featured in the next In Your Dreams, contact us at dreams@lunya.co with a detailed description of the inner workings of your unconscious mind. We're dreaming of hearing from you.
