In my journey of healing my body, I have come to realize that past disassociation due to childhood trauma and lifelong pain has damaged my connection to my body, has interrupted my receipt of signals, disrupted essential communications. I’ve ignored the discomfort until it turns into pain, and ignored the pain until my health is in crisis.
Mindfulness is my tool to repair the connection: checking in regularly with my body throughout the day, whatever I am doing. It has become a habit, so much so that body awareness is now seeping into my dreams more and more often. I’m dreaming and suddenly I feel my body lying in my warm bed: so relaxed, so comfortable. I feel the slackness of my muscles. And in the dream, I collapse to the ground and lie there, unable to rise, as the dream continues all around me. I try to rise, again and again, but my muscles just won’t contract. So I lie there in the dirt, on the rocks, on the floor, on the stairs, wherever I was in the dreamscape when I collapsed.
It happens so often now that it has become my new tip off that I am dreaming, though usually I choose to forget, and slip back into the flow of my subconscious, rather than directing, controlling the dream. Truly, I have even less control, as now I am mainly an observer of the dream’s storyline, rather than a participant.
One day, I awoke so slowly, so languorously, and brought the awareness of my body with me the entire way up into wakefulness. The dream flowed directly into my morning body scan. Now this happens nearly every time I wake.
Lucid and semi-lucid dreams are usual for me, as is occasional sleep paralysis. The merging of the two is an experience I’ve never heard anyone else recount.
2017-01-21
