I’ve been having more vivid dreams since starting therapy. Whether that’s the therapy itself, changes in medication, or simply my mind finally feeling safe enough to wander into places it has spent years avoiding, I don’t know. What I do know is that some mornings I wake carrying a feeling that stays with me long after the details begin to fade.
Recently there were two dreams.
At first they seemed completely unrelated.
The Muffled Scream
In the first, I find myself in a field surrounded by women dressed in beautiful nineteenth-century clothes, all of them waiting patiently, spaced apart and looking in different directions. There was an odd sense of danger despite how peaceful everything looked. Someone explained the rules to me, as though I had wandered into a game that everybody else already understood. If one of the women touched you as you crossed the field, you had to dance with her. If you didn’t… something terrible would happen.
I hesitate; I need to cross the field, to escape, to be free. I must make the decision quickly before I am doomed. I take a deep breath, steel myself and run, run as fast as I can across this minefield of well-dressed mines.
One of these well-mannered, well-dressed women reached out and took hold of me, her grip firm and her face expressing her amusement at my predicament.
I was not able to dance with her. I didn’t know how. I didn’t know the rules. Yet I remember putting my hand gently against the top of her chest, parallel to the ground, looking at her and trying to scream.
I was screaming with everything I had. Nothing came out except a muffled sound, a modulated, almost robotic noise, like an 8 Bit computer loading something from tape; despite its modulated signal quality, it also sounded frustrated, angry, sorrowful.
It stopped screaming; I breathed slowly, exhausted. The woman who held me on that spot, ready to inflict an unknown punishment on me, looked directly at me, almost with compassion, but coldly and quietly said, “I understand.”
She let me go. I woke sweating, ready to run, shaken and with that single sentence echoing in my mind.
Not the scream. Not the fear. Just two words.
I understand.
The Lighthouse
I return to sleep; the dream continues. I see what appears to be the field I crossed; the women had gone. I turn around, and across another field is a road; on the road, inland, no sea in sight, is a Lighthouse.
I walk to the lighthouse; the closer I get, the more like a Church tower it looks. I climb the steps in front and enter. I find ropes instead of stairs used to scale the tower. It’s familiar, but I can’t say why. As I climb the rope, I begin to remember. I belonged to an organisation called “The Lighthouse”.
The organisation occupied the upper floors of the tower. We were investigators of some sort, a secret organisation, chasing impossible mysteries, travelling the world in aircraft that somehow felt perfectly normal inside a dream. We’d failed our last mission, and afterwards every member of the team had their memories erased.
We had all forgotten who we were.
This revelation wasn’t dramatic. There wasn’t a flash of light or a cinematic revelation. It was quieter than that.
It was recognition.
“Oh…”
“I’ve been here before.”
Not just the building.
The person I was inside it.
I woke with exactly the same feelings I had after the first dream. Not confusion, sweaty, ready to run, shaken. But overlaid on that, recognition. As though my subconscious had quietly placed two pieces of the same puzzle on the table and left me to notice they belonged together.
Remembering
For days afterwards I found myself returning to those dreams, not because I was trying to decode them, but because they refused to leave me alone.
As someone living with trauma, I spend a great deal of energy trying to explain what my mind and body are doing. Why a ringing phone can feel like a threat. Why a quiet afternoon can suddenly become overwhelming. Why my body can be convinced I’m in danger while my rational mind is busy pointing out that I’m sitting safely on my own sofa with a cup of coffee.
It’s exhausting trying to translate an experience that often has no words.
Perhaps that’s why those two simple words lingered. “I understand”
Therapy doesn’t feel as though someone is building a new version of me. If anything, it feels like walking back into rooms I’ve kept locked for years. Sometimes I find fear waiting for me. Sometimes grief. Occasionally I find something unexpected: compassion, curiosity, or a version of myself that I thought had disappeared altogether.
Recovery is often described as moving forwards.
I’m beginning to wonder whether, for me, it feels more like remembering. Not remembering every event. Not digging endlessly into the past, uncovering horrible details.
But remembering who I was before my world became organised around surviving it.
Maybe that’s what those dreams were trying to tell me. The scream wasn’t asking to be louder. It was asking to be heard.
And perhaps the Lighthouse wasn’t somewhere I needed to find.
Perhaps it has been standing there all along, waiting for me to remember the way home.