recurrent nightmares

This post was written in response to The One-Minute Writer prompt recurrent nightmares. I will say at this point in time, for the past several years, I have mainly been nightmare free. There are nights here and there that I wake up in the middle of the night ready to cry, clear the energy around me, and go back to sleep more peacefully. However, most of my life prior was spent with nightmares just about every night, even as a child. I always thought that if I actually put my dreams into novels, I could actually be a published author! My dreams were very horrific, filled with torture, and just really painful things. Most of my dreams didn't really phase me, I could wake up and go on with my day just fine. I guess I had just gotten use to them over the years. But whenever I would get into a conversation about dreams and took part by sharing what I had dreamed about, people would be gasping at my grotesque dreams in shock. Even my husband was always so appalled at how terrible my dreams were. I never really knew why I had them throughout that time. Then, one night I had another one, that was really very strange. Strange in the sense that when I awoke, I knew the dream meant something. It was, of course, filled with torture and just awful things that no one would want to see, but I also saw a place in the dream. As I awoke through the fogginess of sleep, more details of this place and situation flooded into my mind, as if I had awoken much too early and some part of me was trying to finish listing off the details I needed to be aware of. I got up and went on with my day, constantly being brought back to that dream with that gut feeling that that particular dream was important for me to unravel. I eventually sat down and began to do some research with the details hanging onto my mind, and discovered an awful historic event that I had previously been unaware of, where a lot of torture and experiments were involved on humans. There was only a couple of very old black and white photographs of some sort pertaining to this event that I found online, and was astounded to discover that one of them was the exact room I had been in, in my dream. At that moment, it all just clicked for me. It was an explanation for why I had been having all of those terrible dreams my entire life. Whether someone wants to spin it as a past life experience or my subconscious somehow being aware of that event during that time, I had experienced that on some deep soul level, and it was bleeding painfully through in my dreams. Once I realized this, all of those dreams stopped. It was pretty hard for me for a while after that to grasp what had gone on during that time, and breaks my heart to think about, but I am so glad to finally be aware and free from the constant cycle of those dreams.