Is Freddy Kruger really about to slice and dice me, or is that just my inner child trying to tell me something?
A deeper look into lucid dreaming and the characters we meet.
The room is dark, the sheets under me are drenched in sweat as I turn to wake up my boyfriend. I need him to console me from the terrifying nightmare I just escaped. I try to adjust my eyes when I realize his black t-shirt has faded into red and green stripes. I reach for his face, but it’s badly burned. As he turns his body towards me I hear a familiar paralyzing laugh. I scream louder and louder, hoping that someone will hear me in the waking world and tear me from the hellish dreamscape. I’ve just had a false awaking after a lucid nightmare and until now I could never understand why my brain would put me through such torture.
When I was younger I had all kinds of reoccurring dreams, but the ones I had the most were nightmares. After a while, I developed the skill of realizing I was only in a dream and would ask myself to wake up. The fact that I was aware I was dreaming meant that I was conscious. When you are conscious in your dreams you are lucid dreaming. Since I was unintentionally lucid dreaming and had no understanding of the concept, I only used the lucidity to wake myself up and escape from the deranged man wearing a Christmas sweater with knives for fingers. I never used the lucidity to my advantage, to explore the dream character or change the dream into a positive one.
Both exploring dream characters and changing dream content or dream environment are practices that I learned while reading Charlie Morley’s Lucid Dreaming: A beginners Guide to Becoming Conscious in Your Dreams. Reading about the practice of dream character exploration really helped me to understand why Freddy had been literally haunting my dreams for the last 18 years. Morley talks about meeting your shadow, a Jungian archetype “made up of all the undesirable aspects of our psyche.” The shadow represents the part of us that we suppress or that we are afraid of. We give that part of our psyche a face and it becomes a dream character. Unfortunately for me, my shadow is the child murderer of Elm Street, who ironically kills people in their sleep.
Morley actually advises that we embrace our shadow instead of running from it. This can open up a line of communication between you and the dream character, getting to the bottom of why they are there in the first place.The shadow becomes present in a dream when your mind wants you to face something that you are suppressing or that has been troubling you. “ In many cases a nightmare is just a dream that’s shouting, ‘Hey look at this! Deal with this! This needs attention!’,” Morley states in his guide. So when you embrace your shadow , your actually embracing your inner self and discovering what needs to be fixed or healed inside of you. If only I had known that when I was seven.
The blog, Lucid Guide, suggests that “An unknown dream character may also take the role of a dream guide.The dream guide does exactly that, he or she guides you through the dream landscape.This is often a recurring dream character who may give you clues and assist you to achieve whatever your goal may be in the dream.” If I would have embraced Freddy in my dream, he could have had the potential to help navigate it and show me the deeper meaning behind his presence. This would probably explain why I still have my Freddy Kruger dream now as an adult. I never confronted him as child.
Morley states that “Nightmares are great for lucid dreaming, and for many people ( more than a third of those surveyed) their fist taste of lucid dreaming came about through nightmares or anxiety dreams.” He advises to “try to stay in the nightmare for as long as you can” and “by shining light onto the darkness and revealing the source of a shadow, we see that the source is often much smaller than the shadow it casts.” Even though we are wired to fight or flight, it’s best to remain and embrace in order to figure out what is under the surface of your nightmare and your shadow. “Move towards acceptance of the shadow, because by allowing it to fester in our denial it will grow and become more powerfully removed from the rest of the psyche,” Morley writes. Another suggestion he makes is to hug your shadow to show acceptance. I have never hugged Freddy, but I have gone as far as letting him finally kill me in my dream. After learning about my shadow, I feel like this is one step closer to acceptance between Freddy and me.
“Once we’re ready to shine light into the places that scare us, we can unravel decades of darkness in one lucid dream.” - Charlie Morley
