Slaying Demons
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Early on a recent morning, I had a vivid dream experience. I was inside a motel room, in an old motor court, a single-story building where guests can park their cars right in front of their rooms. It was dark inside. The curtains were drawn, the lights were off. My clothes hung in the closet; my laptop computer was open on the desk. I knew Peter had gone out to get coffee. All seemed normal, except I was hiding from a demonic entity—in the form of a human—who was coming to harm me. I hoped Peter would come back before the demon got me.
I knew I should pack my suitcase for a hasty escape, or find another exit, but I couldn’t move. I was paralyzed by terror.
And just as the demon pounded on the door, I realized I was dreaming. I woke up briefly, recalled the dream, thought about the situation, then went right back into the dream. This was a lucid dream. I didn’t need to be frightened of that entity or demonic possession. I could control the outcome.
Demons are often metaphors for trauma, as in the phrase:
If you don’t deal with your demons, they’ll deal with you.
I woke up after I had either slayed the demon, or found an exit, or Peter rescued me. Maybe there hadn’t been a threatening entity after all. I pondered the meaning of this dream, and it was easy to decipher. We had been watching two television shows with supernatural premises: Shining Vale and The Bondsman. In the first, actress Courtney Cox is a tenuously sober writer with a husband and children who have recently moved into a dump of a haunted house in Connecticut. Cox allows the former homeowner, a dead 1950’s housewife who murdered her family, to enter her body to ‘help’ write her long-overdue second novel.
Chaos ensues. She takes an ax to her husband. People die. She gets electroshock treatments in a psychiatric hospital until her insurance benefits run out. The book achieves publishing acclaim.
There are so many themes in this wildly campy show that resonate with me, but I’ll just say I identify with her writer’s block.
Kevin Bacon stars in The Bondsman as a murdered bounty hunter who skip-traces demons to return them to hell. This plotline also rings true with me, particularly his tracking of witnesses, deadbeats, and criminals who don’t want to be found. It’s stressful, requires lots of skill and finesse, but Bacon always gets his quarry. Well, in the first three episodes that we’ve watched, anyway.
Been there, done that. But rarely have I been chased by evil entities in real life.
As an investigator of all sorts of mysteries, I find dream interpretation compelling. I often pull apart and examine my dreams for clues, primarily to gauge the state of my subconscious mind, whether to determine my anxiety level or simply for entertainment value.
There is no concrete understanding of why we dream, and according to the journal Psychology Today [1] our dreams are akin to unconscious therapy. It is believed that mood regulation and the integration of recent events into long-term memories are the two activities believed to occur during periods of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. According to this theory, while we are asleep, our brains take the stimuli from our daily activities, process the data, and turns this information into long-term memories. This is called synaptic efficacy refreshment, and this distillation results in dreams. [2]
During a typical night, we experience two types of sleep, REM and non-REM. The cycle begins with non-REM sleep, which occurs in phases. The first is that time just before falling asleep, followed by light sleep. As we progress, our heart rates decrease, our breathing regulates, and our body temperatures drop. The next stage is deep REM sleep, and our first REM cycle typically occurs about 90 minutes after falling asleep.
During the REM cycle, our eyes move rapidly behind closed lids, and our brain waves become more active, at a rate close to wakefulness. Our breathing quickens. But what happens next is intriguing: our bodies are paralyzed during REM sleep. Perhaps this paralysis explains nightmarish scenes of entrapment or the inability to run away from an assailant or escape a life-threatening situation.
The cycle then repeats itself, up to four or five times, over the night. The first round of REM may last only five minutes, but with each cycle we spend a longer time in REM sleep. This is where, sleep experts say, we can experience lucid dreaming. We recognize we are dreaming, and sometimes we realize we have had the dream before. The study of dreams is called oneirology, and this academic field is a combination of scientific analysis and psychology. Most reference articles about lucid dreaming I’ve read, from Psychology Today to WebMD and the Cleveland Clinic say that about 50% of people have experienced this type of active dreaming, and there is a belief that we can learn to manipulate our anxiety and nightmare dreams to essentially rescript them and manage the outcomes of anxiety dreams and nightmares. [3]
The study of dreams is not limited to scientists and psychologists. There are many hundreds of books about dream interpretation. I know two people who dreamed bits of psychic information that helped investigators catch high-profile serial killers. But most of us don’t have prophetic visions. We have dreams that plumb our own subconscious and employ our emotions, anxieties and activities to process our experiences.
The first written account of lucid dreaming was written by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle (384-322 b.c.) In three chapters called On Dreams, contained in the Parva Naturalia, Aristotle described lucid dreaming as an instance of self-awareness during a dream state. He wrote:
“[If] the sleeper perceives that he is asleep and is conscious of the sleeping state during which the perception comes before his mind, it presents itself still, but something within him speaks to this effect. [4]
I have recurrent dreams that I label anxiety dreams or nightmares, depending on my terror level. For many, these types of dreams stem from unresolved traumatic events or issues—the things we sweep under the rug and hope to forget. But they manifest themselves in our dreams and come back to haunt us.
Our personal demons who won’t let us forget them.
Analyzing the emotions and events that spark them is a game for me. For example, in one recurring dream Peter and I are at the airport, about to board a flight to Australia, a country we plan to visit. We are about to board the plane when I realize I don’t have my passport. Peter has his.
This dream has had so many variations in how it plays out: Peter flies alone and I’m left at the airport. Or we rebook our flights. In one, I hailed a taxi and rushed to get home and back in time for our flight. In one instance my three children are with us, and one has forgotten his passport, meaning I need to remain behind, too. In all the scenarios I know that I am dreaming, and I’ve had this dream before, but I’ve never successfully gotten onto that plane headed to Australia.
This is lucid dreaming, and, if sleep experts are to be believed, we can control the outcomes of these lucid dreams, which I did when I (somehow) escaped the demon at the motor court. If I can think about this dream while I am awake, and rehearse a better ending, I can turn this from an anxiety dream into one with a happy ending.
When I have this dream again, I will find the passport in a zippered compartment in my backpack. I’ll hand it to the gate agent and board the plane, with Peter.
Recently I experienced a real doozy of an anxiety dream that I haven’t been able to decipher. It was about the distribution of vegetables. I can’t seem to sort out the meanings in this one. In it, “they” have instructed me to assemble food products in alphabetical order—avocados or apples for the letter A, broccoli and bananas with the letter B, and so on. I’m supposed to do this in two sets, one for each house—the one we live in, and the one we’ve been trying to sell for a year. That house is, thankfully, under contract after a recent, and rather drama-less bidding war, but that’s a story for another time.
I’m in the kitchen, packing boxes of foods items I’ve been instructed to prepare. Piles of eggplant and eggs, carrots and cheese, peaches and pickles, mushrooms and melons cover the butcher block island. I’m making a list as I place the items in boxes labeled with the street names of each house.
All goes well as I work through the alphabet until I hit the letter X. I can’t think of any food products that begin with that letter, or, for that matter, the letter Z. I’m stumped.
Peter entered the kitchen to see what I’m doing. I explain, but I’m agitated. He scanned my list, then told me I’ve also neglected to select food for the letters Q or U. He suggested zucchini, then an Ugli fruit, but we didn’t have any to put in the boxes.
“Quiche for Q,” I say. I am near tears. I don’t have the ingredients or the time to bake quiche. And we still don’t have anything for X.
And then I woke up. I spent a good part of the day wondering what the message was behind this dream.
If there was a message.
Feel free to chime in. But please don’t say the fruits are symbolic of sexual desires or wish fulfillment, as Dr. Freud suggested in his 1899 book, The Interpretation of Dreams, where he insisted that nearly any dream artifact was related to repressed sexuality. For Freud, a snake represented a penis but so did nearly every other common object, including many fruits and vegetables. A chest of drawers or a suitcase represented a vagina.
Fully committed to the idea of inhibited desires, Freud probably never said “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.”
Or a carrot is just a carrot.
I’ll leave that here. I’m more of a Jungian, choose-my-own-symbolism kind of girl anyway.
[1] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/basics/dreaming
[2] https://dreamsandmythology.com
[3] https://health.clevelandclinic.org/what-is-lucid-dreaming-and-how-to-do-it
[4] https://www.medicalnewstoday.com