I had always heard of the term “lucid dream”, yet I never really knew what a lucid dream was. As it turns out, I had been having lucid dreams for almost 20 years and now I’m not.
When I would write in my journal about dreams that I had, I would always refer to them as one of those dreams. Those dreams were the ones in which I could actually feel the intensity of the emotions and feelings associated with what was happening in the dream. Every night I would have a dream that was lengthy and detailed, almost like a mini-movie. I remembered these dreams every time I woke up. However, not every dream was one of those. Many times in my dreams I was aware of the fact that I was dreaming. But not all of them were like that. Sometimes I didn’t realize I was dreaming until the very end. Or I would know that I was dreaming and still have no way to make the dream end. I could also control some elements of what was happening in my dreams. For example, a recurring dream that I had involved the house I live in now being haunted. I knew it was haunted because a rocking chair would be moving rather strongly on its own. Because of feeling afraid, I would tell the “ghost” to stop and the chair would stop moving. Another way of controlling what I dreamed involved a simple mantra that I would say to myself during my awake time before falling asleep. If my mind would wander to something that had the potential to give me an unpleasant dream, I would tell myself “I don’t want to dream about that”. And it worked. I have never dreamed about something after telling myself that I didn’t want to dream about it.
For 20 years my dreams at night were a relatively big part of my life. And now they’re gone. I always thought the dreams were because the mental health medicine I had taken every night put me in a deep sleep and that was the reason for them. As it turns out, one of the meds I took has lucid dreams as a side effect. A quick Google search of the definition of lucid dreaming and what returns is exactly what I had experienced many nights. Now that I’m off those original meds and am taking something different, I have recently noticed that I don’t have those dreams anymore. In fact, I’ve become like most people who rarely remember what they dreamed about the night before. And what I do remember is only a small bit. Not the feature length dream I’m used to having.
I was thinking about it tonight, because it’s almost midnight where I live and I can’t sleep. I was wondering if I miss those dreams or if I’m glad I don’t have them anymore. Having such hyper-realistic dreams were nice when the content of the dreams were nice. But when the dreams were negative and unpleasant—such as dreaming about my own death, or my husband divorcing me unexpectedly—they could be considered true nightmares. I have always believed in the power of dreams and so I often tried to find meaning or symbolism in these dreams. Dreams about loved ones that had passed on were especially meaningful. I hate to think my connection to them in that way has been permanently severed.
Regardless of whether I miss them or not, sleeping at night and waking the next morning is definitely a different experience now than it was before I switched my medication about a year ago.
Leave a Reply