How do you know you’re “you” in your dreams?
Do you see yourself in a mirror? Do the characters in your dreams call you by name? Do you recognize the room you are in? Does the person next to you look like your beloved? Are you wandering about in a place that seems familiar?
How do you know you’re you in your dream?
I’ve been asking myself this question a lot lately: How do I know I am Me in my dreams?
Am I? Always? Or just sometimes? How often?
Sometimes after waking up from a dream, I don’t know for certain I was Me. Especially if the dream takes place in an unrecognizable structure, town, or time period. It is after having these types of dreams that I have reflected on whether we may be able to experience past lives in dreams. Sometimes when the scene is surreal or the characters non-Earthly, I consider the stories out of Robert Monroe’s writings, wondering if I have astral traveled to another dimension or inhabited someone else’s body.
Upon waking, there I am, with my sense of self who reflects back upon the dream images, feelings, and events, noting how inside the dream, I was wholly involved in the story of it...as if it was Me.
This sense of self is most evident in highly reactive dreams: dreams in which I am afraid I may be harmed or may die; dreams in which I am late or lost; and dreams in which I’m being praised, acknowledged, or adored.
In those dreams, I feel all the action is certainly happening to me, around me, or with me.
But is it?
As I’ve continued my journey with Natural Dreamwork, a modality I am currently training in, I’ve become more aware in both dreams and waking life how quickly I determine I know what’s going on in a scene. I also notice how reactive I am to the scenario based on my determination.
All it takes is one grimace from an older woman’s face to “know” I have disappointed her.
All it takes is one swift move of a strange man’s hand to be certain he’s about to harm me.
All it takes is an introduction to an attractive male celebrity for me to become hyper-focused on him over everything else around me.
The above are true for both waking life and dreams.
Dreamwork, however, has caused me to practice taking a little more time following an event or interaction in waking life before determining. And to use this time for grace, refinement, curiosity, or deeper feeling.
In our daily lives, how often do you pause between a stimulus and a response? With our dreams, we can hopefully learn better how.
We do this through reflecting upon the imagery and the encounters of the dream after we are awake. We can engage in this practice independently or with a friend or practitioner. (I do this by myself every day, in a monthly dream circle with friends, and bi-weekly with a dreamwork practitioner.)
Certainly in our rehashing of our life’s events and encounters, we can evaluate our behavior and see where we could have acted with more caution, love, kindness, or grace.
But there is something a little less at stake when we do this with our dream imagery. Whether it’s less shame, less attachment, or less belief in the realism of dream encounters, we seem to be able to return to dream imagery with more ease and curiosity than we do memory.
Here’s an example of how I may return to a dream encounter with curiosity upon waking.
Let’s take a nightmare-type scenario in which I believe I am falling down deep into the sea and as I try to swim up and reach the surface a strange man approaches me. The look on his face tells me he is hostile. I quickly assume his hostility is toward me. I then believe he is going to get me and keep me from reaching the surface. I swim up and away from him as fast as I can.
In the morning, I ask myself whether there was truly cause for alarm when the man approached me. How certain was I that his facial expression represented hostility? What reason might this unfamiliar man have for approaching me in the water? How do I know he was, indeed, headed for me and not an unseen fish behind me?
How do I know I was even Me in this dream, and not the fish? Maybe I was the fish.
Questioning my certainty about these dream encounters has me realizing just how much and how swiftly I make meaning, assumptions, and determinations in my waking life without pause, without allowing the encounter to play out a little longer. What if I instead just waited and observed?
In waking life, I understand why it feels like we don’t always have that grace period, that time for reflecting or inquiry. Especially in our very fast-paced modern world. And, especially when we are in situations that seem like recognizable repeats of past experiences of danger, harm, or trauma.
That said, maybe we do have more time than we realize. Sometimes. Perhaps, if we check with ourselves, we will realize there are more instances in life that allow for grace.
It’s fun to experiment with grace periods, I’ve learned. Fun in the same way running ’til you almost pass out is fun. Okay, not fun, but novel and interesting?
Hyper-vigilance and fear wear a person out over the course of a life, much more than running til you almost pass out. So trying to manage reactivity has a lot of long-term health benefits.
Yesterday, YouTube offered me a clip of an old Seinfeld episode: the one in which Jerry is dating a woman who finishes all of his sentences for him. Except she is wrong every single time. He continues to date this woman, passively allowing her to affect the course of his daily life with her finishing of his sentences. (As he often does, Jerry ends the relationship by the end of the episode.)
What even this small clip presented to me was an example of how quickly we assume we know the person in front of us (what he is preparing to do or say, or how he feels), and about the situation we are currently facing. This is reactivity.
The clip also demonstrated how we sometimes determine our behavior based on what we predict is headed our way, rather than what may actually be coming. This is also reactivity.
It may be obvious to say but another option for the girlfriend would be to wait and see what it is Jerry will say. Then wait even a little longer after he says it to process. And then ask a question or two, perhaps, if clarity is needed.
Jerry, in the episode, is someone who passively moves through this relationship. He doesn’t like conflict. He can’t be bothered to correct her, to let her know she’s got him all wrong. He is too uncomfortable. This is another kind of reactivity.
Subsequently, they are inside a false relationship: one in which she believes she knows him so well she can finish his sentences. (An exaggerated example of no grace period at all.) And he allows it in order to avoid a true, but potentially uncomfortable encounter.
Remember the unfamiliar man in the sea swimming toward me in the dream? I didn’t allow for encounter at all. I swam away from him as fast as I could. I was sure he was out to get me. I didn’t let him finish his sentence. I didn’t even let him start one.
In dreams, we tend to be pretty reactive and assumptive. We make sense of the content in our dreams based on pretty limited, and sometimes contradictory information.
We believe the house we are in is the same house we grew up in despite noticing small differences, like the front door is not red as it was in your childhood, but yellow.
We are certain the person approaching us in the dark is targeting us for robbery, even though all he’s done to indicate as such is walking quietly four steps behind you on the sidewalk.
Mainly we act like this because we are not aware we are dreaming.
Some might say that this is a good reason to learn how to become lucid in dreams. Then we have more awareness. I’m not sure. When we learn how to be more lucid in our dreams, we can sometimes play around with and adjust our reactivity. But we still bring with us a sense of self very much associated to personal identity. We bring our beliefs, our assumptions, our conditioning, our spiritual affiliations, our traumas, our relationship dynamics, and our reactivity. (This irony is often ignored or overlooked by a lot of lucid dreamers; especially the ones seeking more control or more “opportunities” in their dreams.)
Above, regarding my dream that took place in the sea, I questioned not only who I was, but whether or not I was even human inside the dream. Was I the fish?
But what if I wasn’t even the fish?
What if I was the water?
What if we woke up from our dreams, and instead of instantly trying to make meaning of them, we asked more questions?
I encourage you to let me know in the comments how you know you’re you in your dreams, and what happens once you wake up, recall the dream, and start asking yourself the question: how do I know I was Me?