The Gumshoe’s Guide to Getting Off the Couch, Part 4: Dreams

[Another installment in an ongoing series of I'm-not-sure-how-many-yet posts about how I healed from lifelong depression without medication. This is my personal story, and I am in no way, not-uh, not ever going to criticize anyone who needs antidepressants, or tell anyone what to do. You might want to start here.]

For me, depression was a dark formula. Why am I feeling like this when my life is good, and I have so many gifts and blessings? If there’s no rational explanation for this, that means there is no explanation whatsoever. Which means I must be the problem. Therefore I am horrible and worthless and broken. Q. E. D. (And repeat.)

No, there wasn’t a rational, quantifiable explanation. But I wasn’t broken either. There was a third option I didn’t see for the longest time. And that was that there was a lot of stuff going on for me on a deeper, frustratingly-amorphous soul-level.

The problem was that whenever I was drawn to exploring what I would call “irrational” things, like listening to my heart or cleansing my chakras or aromatherapy or whatever, I’d be all Whaaa?? Because I believed that people who could operate on this level were either complete nutters, or that they had the ability to tune into something I was unable to. Either way the whole arena was totally frustrating.

So I was caught between an intellectual Scylla and Charybdis. I understood that something beyond the rational existed and had power over my state of mind, yet my conscious mind was a gatekeeper who would not let me go there. It immediately shut down thoughts and feelings I did not understand. (The bigger problem was that it had been doing this all along, but that realization came later.)

There was only one time that my conscious mind slacked off on its vigilance as a gatekeeper, and that was when it was literally asleep. During this time my soul, my unconscious, was free to come out and play and send me messages. Of course, usually once I awoke my rational mind kicked in again and told me I was dreaming nonsense. Or forgot it altogether.

I had always prided myself on being smart and logical. But once I could no longer ignore the fact that the rational approach really wasn’t working, I reached a point of surrender. Listening to my dreams was part of my surrender.

The funny thing about dreamtime is that while it might be made of crazy imaginings that seemingly come out of nowhere, in the light of day the dream itself becomes a fact. It happened. My rational brain likes facts. So while I was unable to tune in to my energy or pray or listen to my heart… I did know for a fact that last night I dreamed I went scuba diving with my mother.

What can I say? It was a start. I finally had a trail of clues that I could follow.

And once I unleashed my rational-problem-solving mind onto figuring out what the dreams meant, it turns out that it was actually pretty good at that.

Once I started paying attention, I realized I had dreams all the time that deeply informed my emotions, my relationships, my ingrained habits and patterns. My dreams allowed me to work though stuff by using them as a story.

But I also I had dreams that I never figured out, that caused me to bawl like a baby and wordlessly healed deep hurts within me.

So even when I couldn’t figure out the answer, or come up with some great analysis, my dreams were still hard at work. Just writing it down, remembering, then going over it with my rational mind opened up that communication pathway between parts of myself.

(Dream analysis itself is a topic for many more posts, but if you don’t know where to start, my next post will cover the barest basics of dream analysis.)

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