Who Are You My Demons?

This time it will be again about the dreams. I do analyze them a lot. With my therapist too. Each week, when it happens I remember my dreams, I write them down to try and interpret these during my sessions.

First of all, what I have learnt about the dreams, is that these come only to people who want to have them. It means if you want to dream and then remember these, they will come to you. Second of all I have finally learnt is how to properly interpret these, I hope 🙂 At the beginning, before starting my therapy, when I was trying to analyze any of my dreams in which a friend, my father, my colleague, beautiful landscape etc. appeared I was always thinking it was something about them – that my subconscious was trying to tell me something about these people. Now I know in 99% the dream is not about people appearing there, it is only about me and what they represent in my life. The more I dig, the more I find out about myself, as the third thing I learnt about dreams was that it is my subconscious trying to tell me more about my personality and even give me some tips of how to solve issues or concerns that appear in my life. As I wrote previously and I will repeat it now – subconscious has an amazing power in our lives. If we get to know it better, it can become a great friend and an ally in our lives.

I have also heard, from one of my friends, that people are looking for authenticity. I agree with her. After analyzing these words it came into my mind that in order to be authentic I need to reveal very deep emotions and experiences from my life and share it with others. Only that way I can make others understand themselves. I also know I will only be able to do so if people want to hear my story along with my life observation and experience.

To start with – two examples of my dreams and my demons appearing in them. We all have demons hunting us all of the time and it is only up to us if we deal with them or not. The result of my analysis occurred to be incredibly surprising. Let’s see below:

A few years back I had the most terrible dream in my life in which I was shot by the SSman. It is always terrifying to be killed or die in a dream. Especially that after the shot, I did not wake up, I felt incredibly calm while I was dying. So yes – I died in my own deam! I still remember I was hiding behind a very old Polish car – Syrenka. It was the time of the II World War and I wanted to survive, so I was hiding. However this soldier, the SSman came from behind and without any word just shot me. The interpretation is as follows, very simple one that I only learnt 2 years back when I started my therapy – I was defeated by my demons. The dream showed me they control my life subconsciously and I surrender to them.
A few weeks after I started my therapy, that was February 2016, I had another meaningful dream. I was in my flat, in my bedroom and suddenly a devil appeared out of the blue. He was in the form of my colleague – tall, strong, calm, even had the hors. Incredibly realistic. However me, instead of running away screaming and being terrified, I jumped onto him and started shouting at him I did not want to see him in my life! I even accused him of how he dared to come into my flat uninvited! I remember I was fighting him with my fists 🙂 Finally I kicked him out! Such a big guy was defeated by such a small girl 🙂 The interpretation occurred to be very interesting – my subconscious showed me I am starting to deal with my demons, even fighting them, not being afraid of them anymore, and the most important – not allowing them to control my life anymore! It had and amazing significance in my life of what that time my subconscious tried to tell me.

For me it is amazing to dream. I just love it! I feel I am connected then to my second part – the subconscious one. The two above examples prove how important it is for me to understand myself. And because I am working very hard on it, the dreams come to help me. Isn’t that significant for all of us to better understand ourselves and in the same to have better control of our actions? How many times have we acted the way we were not really proud of later on or we did not fully understand why we behaved the way we did? Isn’t that amazing that the answer to all of our concerns and our abilities lies in ourselves? The only thing that needs to be done is to reach into our subconscious. And dreams can help us do so. We only need to try to listen to them. I have many dreams written down as I also noticed if I write them down I manage to remember them better.

If any of the readers of this article are inspired by my observation and would like to start listening to their dreams here is my tip, as the dreams tend to fly away very quickly once we wake up. What I do every morning, when I wake up, to remember what I dreamt of is that I do not get up immediately, I lay down for about 10 more minutes in my bed with my eyes closed and try to concentrate to remind my brain what I was dreaming of. Once I do so it is not that easy to forget the dream. Sometimes I write the keywords of the dream immediately in my notebook during my breakfast or later in the afternoon as in some case during the day more images from my last night’s dream appear in my brain. What is crucial, in my opinion, is just a bit of a focus straight after waking up.

Sometimes, when there is something bothering me, before going to sleep I tell to myself – ok my subconscious, tell me what you think about it. And imagine I always get the answer! I always get the dream about my current problem and the tips of how to solve it! That is incredible that the answer to any of our concerns and issues is within ourselves. It only requires to pay attention to what is being said by our subconscious. However the biggest challenge is to learn how to properly interpret the dreams and the symbols in it. As our subconscious cannot speak any languages and cannot give us a direct answer, her only way of showing us the path is by images and the symbols in these appearing in our dreams. I do hope I am now able to interpret my dreams correctly and I do listen to them strongly believing they can help me understand myself better to lead a good, calm, and peaceful life!

One of my Dreaming Symbols – Water

During my whole psychotherapy I have discovered there is one symbol that appears quite often in my dreams. This symbol is water. When I started digging into it with the therapist as well as with myself, I managed to figure it out. Water means my subconscious itself reflected in my consciousness. It is also one of the archetypical symbols Jung was speaking of and analyzing. The way I managed to interpret it correctly – I hope finally – helped me understand my subconscious better. I need to admit water appears in my dreams at least once a month. At the beginning, I was usually dreaming I was diving deeply into the water, swimming in it or dipping into it. Now I know it means that in my conscious life I was acting led by my subconscious needs. That also proves the power of it – most of our actions are led by our subconscious and we are not even aware of it! Once I started working on my subconscious, trying to understand it by analyzing its needs and use its power – my dreams also changed. Especially the ones with water. Now when I dream of a swimming poor, ocean, lake or anything that represents water, I see myself rather standing on a beach and admiring an ocean view along with a strong feeling I do not want to dive into it. If I did dive that would mean coming back to my old, unconcious habits! I know it is safer for me to stay attached to my conscious part for the time being. However, my dreams remind me there is still the unconscious one that does not want to be forgotten. I am aware I do not allow myself to any subconscious acts, I try to stay away from these. Do I really manage? My observation shows that subconscious is incredibly powerful in our lives and getting to know it is a very hard job as well as painful in most cases. Will I ever be able to get to know it 100%? I do not think so. I do not think it is possible to get to know ourselves 100%. However expanding the knowledge about our subconscious and its way of leading our lives is an amazing adventure! My therapy sessions helped me a lot in getting to know why I am acting the way I am and in the same gave me an opportunity to choose – if I still want to act led by my subconscious needs or there are some of my behaviors I am not really proud of and would like to change. That is probably why now, when I am dreaming of water, it is rather drifting on its surface trying not to touch it or diving into it – that is out of the question! I try to stay away from water as much as possible. That means in some ways I am trying to kill my subconscious and do not allow it to speak anymore. Is that a better solution than acting based on my subconscious needs? I know that sometimes listening to it is a good idea. Anyway how do I know which needs written in my subconscious part bring me filfillment, make me happy and which harm me? Probably I will find it out eventually. For the time being, at least, I know what my subconscious wants to tell me when the water symbol appears in my dreams. If not the therapy I would probably never be able to figure out what such a symbol may mean in my life and how it may help me to get to know myself better.

Psychoanalysis – to Go or Not to Go?

Why did I decide to go to a therapy and what is its result? There were three reasons for me to do so. The first one was the toxic relationship I was involved in with in and out for the past 20 years, the second was my friend who encouraged for me to do so by revealing his life story and a nasty divorce, and the third one was a new manager at work I couldn’t completely get along with.

So I searched the Internet for a good psychologist. At the beginning I did not know if she was good or not, yet I decided to give it a try. It’s been around three years I am going to the therapy and now I know it was the best decision I have ever made. Quite an expensive one though. The whole therapy and revealing the biggest subconscious secrets from your life to a stranger, and in the same time realising them yourself, made me more self-aware, more conscious, and more intelligent. I do admit at the beginning it was painful and I remembered many evenings after the sessions that ended up in tears. Anyway the pain was worth it. Now I am able to lead a very conscious life and the relationships I am building with others are more honest, sincere and real.

In my opinion not everyone had toxic parents, yet there are always things in our minds we are not aware of and in some cases they may lead our subconscious resulting in making decisions that hurt us. And later on we keep asking ourselves why did we do that to us?

I knew that I was always doing a lot of analysing and I loved thinking why things happen and what was the reason for them to happen, and the psychoanalysis helped me in putting all of my thoughts together and getting a result out of it. It also gave me knowledge how to analyse my dreams. Previously when there was a person in my dream I knew like a friend, or a parent, or an aunt, or somebody else, I always thought the dream was about them. Now I know it was always about me. These people were only symbols reflecting my subconscious. Once I learnt how to read them, I know what my subconscious wants to tell me. And I listen to it as it has an incredible power.

I was always interested in psychology, so thanks to the therapy I got to know how my brain works, read a lot of interesting books that helped me to understand the emotional part of human being that I was never really able to show because of my toxic mother and became smarter. I have also learned what my parents were through in their childhood. That made me realise the way they treated me wasn’t because they wanted to hurt me deliberately, but it was the result of their unsolved emotions along with their childhood issues. As a small kid I was an easy target to suck all of their toxic emotions as I did not know how to protect myself from these. Now I do and now I do not allow others to cross my boundaries. I do feel sorry for what my parents have been put throughout their early lives, yet I think they were not allowed to hurt me the way they did. On the other hand I’m grateful for what happened because it made me an amazing, strong and independent woman who knows how to enjoy life and is not afraid of living 🙂 It only proves the relationships we have with our parents are always difficult to judge and to be in. Now I’m trying to rebuild and learn how to create a healthy relationship with my father. I am aware I’ll never have a normal one with my mother, because it’s just not possible, and it will never be as she ended up mentally sick.

Coming back to the clue, in my opinion it is worth going to the therapy. The only factor that may stop you is the fear of getting to know the truth with the whole pain that goes with it. Once you deal with the pain, in return you get consciousness, honesty, self-awareness and then you can do whatever you want with that knowledge. I chose to be happy, to enjoy every day life and being grateful that even though my childhood was not a perfect one and my parents occurred to be weak human beings, I managed to grow up a wonderful person who loves to live, loves people and appreciates small things that every day life bring 🙂 Thanks to the therapy I am able not to hurt people the way I was probably doing subconsciously. And not to hurt the person I love the most – that is myself 🙂