So recently I’ve been having some very vivid, emotional but somehow all muddled up dreams.

Most of my dreams have included a mixture of people I know now, people I knew in the past and people I don’t know at all. They don’t necessarily include events I’ve actually experienced but the feelings and emotions I’m waking up with (sometimes in the middle of the night) are ones I can vividly remember feeling when I was younger.

It would be fair to say I grew up in a broken home. My parents separated when I was around 6 years old, my sister was around 2 and my brother not even one. The separation and divorce did not go that smoothly and I can remember quite a few arguments between my parents when we were being dropped off for custody visits.

On top of that when my father remarried the woman he married had 3 older children of her own and they fostered a child as well. As a step family they were completely dysfunctional (if you’re reading – sorry dad, you didn’t make the best choices :-)). We used to visit every second weekend and for the first half of every school holidays. During that time we’d hardly get to see dad because he was off working and it felt more like our step mum viewed all of us kids as slave labour. When we did get to see dad he was exhausted as he seemed to be working night and day.

This led to many, many nights crying myself to sleep and wishing I was back home at mum’s house. Again, sorry dad but I never felt like I was home when we were there. I had a lot if mixed up emotions at this time.

I loved both of my parents but at times I wasn’t sure that either of them loved me. On several occasions I even considered running away, which seems to have been a subconscious consideration as well because I sleep walked out of the house once and woke up in the neighbour’s yard and had to knock on the back door to be let back in.

The feelings of worthlessness and insecurity transferred across to how I acted at school. I had a lot of trouble making friends and when I did make friends in was never sure if they actually liked me. This fear I’ve only recently lost in the last 5 years as my relationship with E and our closest friends has blossomed.

These dreams I’ve been having have made a lot of the fear and insecurity I experienced when I was younger resurface.

This could have been a bad thing and dragged me down into depression, but as I’m trying to take the positive approach to this illness, I’ve been applying that to my dreams as well.

Whenever I wake up experiencing those dark and confusing emotions I’m attempting to sit back and analyse what has caused it and see how I can reevaluate the situation to be more positive. This means I’m looking both at the situation that occurred in the dream (if I can remember it) and trying to find what situations in my life may be stressing me out to cause these dreams.

So far I haven’t been able to work out what the real life cause of these feelings are but I am learning new ways to cope with these feelings as I recover from my late night (sometimes multiple times a night) wake ups with my heart racing and the intense tightness of a scream or a cry in my chest.

The best way I can get through these dreams is to believe they are occurring for a reason and they are there to help me heal from the emotional damage of my past.

Have you experienced a recurrence in emotions about events you thought were history for you? How have you dealt with those situations?

Do you believe your dreams can help you heal?