On Dreamscapes and Nightmares
As a kid I dreamed a lot. In the sleeping or waking hours I could be found in the dreamscape in one way or another.
The problem was many of my dreams were nightmares. Night terrors really. The same one over and over again to be exact.
I would wake up in the dream and and have to use the bathroom, which was just across the hall from the bedroom. 2 1/2 BIG steps would transport me from the doorway of my bedroom to the safety of the doorway to the bathroom.
It was the hallway that I was trying to avoid.
Why, you ask?
The monsters of course!
(Image of Monsters from the movie “Monsters, Inc” found here)
See, if I walked out of my room and looked to the left and the hallway was dark they could grab me. Sometimes the hallway was lit up and I would be brave enough to walk down the hall a short way to the foot of the stairs.
No monster’s then…unless the grandfather clock that loomed at the foot the stairs struck Midnight. It was like a battlecry that woke them up and they took me that way as well.
So I taught myself how to wake up from my nightmares.
I would find a mirror in the dream - there was usually one in the room. And then I would stand in front of it and SCREAM as loud as I could - WAKE UP NICOLE!
Over…and over…and over again until I did. Sometimes I woke up back in the dream so I had to repeat the process until I found myself in the living.
As I got older that nightmare started to fade and I found I could dream a full night away.
The nightmares would sometimes come back, just in different forms. But always within a home or residence of some kind, and me trying to escape it while the house tried to keep me in. Forcing me to go further down into its basements while I desperately searched for the way out.
As I got older I began to realize the monsters had made their way out of my dreams, and had centered themselves in my everyday reality. No longer was I trying to wake myself up, now I found myself desperate for sleep.
But sleep was elusive because I had “made it” - I was an Assistant Vice President for Campus Life with an affiliated faculty role in Africana Studies at Brown University. Not bad for an FGLI (first-generation college/low-income) Black woman who was told most of my life that I needed to prove I was worthy enough to be in any educational institutional space during my studies and training.
This is a disciplining process. I was disciplined to use my intelligence and creativity for the goals of the institution and it needed, at all times, MORE.
More articles, more programs, more students, more money, more community, more events, more inclusion, more…more…more…
The shit never stopped. And I kept getting more and more consumed in its insatiable appetite.
(Image of monster from the movie “Nope” found here)
Then I broke. And the world broke. We collectively broke down together.
And in the present day, as we all sift through the rubble and figured out what it is that we are saving and why, if anything, of this beast we call society, the ability to be able to dream is more important than ever.
I had to relearn how to dream again. Which meant I had to face my nightmare.
I needed to go back into that house that haunted me most of my life, make my way down into the basement, and see what it was that I had been running from my whole life.
Cause I had also been running in the waking hours and I was too tired to keep running anymore.
So I went back into my dreamscape, over and over again, when many of us were locked in our homes and had nowhere to go but internal.
This time I had to use different strategies because I didn’t have a great relationship to sleep at this point in my life - I was in full burnout and my body felt like it hated me.
I started to use guided mediations from the Chopra App in 2021 as a way to calm my mind and figure out what a meditative practice would/could look like for me. The more I learned to go into a meditative state the more I was able to then also go into my dreamscape. And once I was in there, the house appeared.
It came back in different forms - sometimes the house of my childhood. Other times a bungalow that was familiar yet I didn’t know why. And still other times it was a complex apartment building or hotel.
Dream analysts say the house represent the body. And the different parts of the house represent different parts of your body. For example, the front door/front of house can be the face or head. The back of the house can be those things in the back of minds of hidden from us.
I could go into most parts of the house in my dreams, exploring more and more as I continued in my meditative practice. But when it came to going down into whatever basement their was, I would either wake myself up because the terror was sharp, or if there was a door I would try and slam it close.
The thing was each time I would slam that door, it would open right back up. With a slow ease…inviting me in.
I needed help to go through it. A former friend recommended her therapist who focused on Tapping (EFT). I figured it couldn’t hurt and I started to work with her.
It was during one of our sessions that I went back into the house and found myself standing at the foot of the stairs. I looked down, took a DEEP breathe…and began my descent.
What I found shocked me a bit as it was old boxes full of papers and pictures haphazardly thrown in them with cobwebbed corners lining the background.
“It’s old memories…” I remember saying out loud.
My therapist replied, “Good…keep going.”
Then I came to a back room with a door that was open, and the room was dark. Pitch dark. I didn’t want to go in. It felt like ice shooting down my chest as I stopped right at the doorway.
As I tapped on my collarbone in the mundane, I finally stepped into the dark.
And the light came on, and there I was. My younger self, playing. Drawing at a desk. I looked around and as I adjusted my sight I realized I was also in my childhood bedroom.
Light began to shine more as the window that looked out to the backyard became clearer, illuminating the bed with my old comforter of cartoon characters sprawled over it.
