Grief and Lucid Dreaming
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A few months ago, I became interested in lucid dreaming. Lucid dreaming is essentially where you ‘wake up’ in your dreams and become aware that you are dreaming. With this awareness, you gain the ability to affect what happens within your dreams. The more you practice this ability, the more you are able to shape the nature of your dreams.
This may sound odd but I became interested in exploring lucid dreaming as a therapeutic tool for grief.
I had never heard or read about this technique in healing from loss and grief before, but resolved to try it because if you can affect the nature of your dreams, this also means that you can see your loved one again and interact with them.
Grief brings with it so many unresolved emotions. The nature of my loss occurred suddenly, so it was a bit difficult to process because one day the person I loved was there and the next day they were not. One of my interests then, was to help resolve and process my unresolved emotions related to grief.
I’ve never been one to be very interested in my dreams, nor to take them seriously at all. Even though I am a psychologist, we never received training in dreams and it couldn’t have been perceived as farther from the serious study of the mind. Yet from exploring this world of lucid dreaming, I have found it to be very rich. It also deepened my healing from loss in unexpected ways. I have discovered that there is great therapeutic value in exploring dreams.
Not only have I been able to see the person I lost and to heal through these lucid experiences, but by exploring lucid dreaming, I have been able to explore the nature of consciousness itself.
It turns out that the type of consciousness we experience while waking is only one type of consciousness. We feel as if it is reality and that we are able to fully see and experience life from this waking lens but what I have learned is that this couldn’t be farther from the truth.
There is the consciousness that is experienced when you wake up in a dream — it feels so alive and yet you are physically asleep. After several nights of this, you realize that waking life too, is a state of consciousness. You realize that this waking life isn’t all there is.
You begin to experience things that are very mystical. One night I floated gently in an infinite space of stars and felt the most peaceful that I have in my entire life. From feeling this peace, I sensed that there is something more to life than what we experience and see in our daily lives.
In another dream, I saw Brian - we were wandering a toy store and he was waiting at the checkout line for me with a friend. We left the store laughing and running along to the car outside, and I woke up with this feeling I hadnt experienced in years since our college days — just pure happiness, joy, lightheartedness.
This was a gift because it showed me that I had experienced these things and that they were still within me.
I’m therefore writing and sharing this with you in hopes that you might experience some gifts of your own too.
I will share my experiences with grief, lucid dreaming, and consciousness in upcoming posts. Thus far, I have had separated my writing on grief from mental health, bipolar/manic depression, on different blogs/websites, but I recently experienced a shift within me that made me realize how much I would like to write again, and will thus focus all my writing on this blog to make it easier. If you are uninterested in the writing, please feel free to unsubscribe, but if you are interested, thank you so much for reading and connecting and please dont hesitate to reach out, Ive really enjoyed interacting with readers over the years.
Have you ever explored lucid dreaming? What are your thoughts on exploring it as a therapeutic tool for grief? Have you experienced visitation dreams from your loved ones and was it meaningful?
Dear readers — thank you for reading this post. it means so much to me. If you enjoyed it, I invite you to connect with me through the comments below and to share the post with someone who you think might also find it helpful in living with grief. You might also find my book, Grieving the Loss of a Love: How to Embrace Grief to Find True Hope and Healing After a Divorce, Breakup, or Death helpful to read or to pass along to others. Thank you again.
