I've never really dreamed much but this one is really bothering me and I want to understand it. I've been having nightmares the last week. Last night's was the worst.

I dreamt I was working with some people I can't remember to build something. We had to go swimming in a muddy, dirty brown river to get the pieces to help build whatever we were making. I came along. I vividly remember this part, where I was floating/swimming in the river. I turned to my right and there were amputated human legs. There were human bodies floating all around I then realized. I looked ahead of me in the river and saw the two people I was with cutting up the bodies. I looked past them and saw severed heads... when they saw me looking at them, they told me to help them. This is when I woke up.

I've never had a dream this disturbing before, any suggestions as to what it could mean?

Hi jaded,

Let's take a closer look at several symbols in your scary dream. Water represents your emotional life, and so does a river. It's a muddy river, meaning that your emotions are bungled up, a mess, and you yourself can't make out anymore what you feel. You mention how you have to build something, and I would tranfer this as you being supposed to build your life. Understandbly building your life while you feel like an emotional mess is a scary undertaking.

The dream shows you cut off legs. Legs are the limbs that help you stay grounded, that enable you to walk, and someone who has confidence shows it in the way he or she supports themselves in their stance. In your life right now though it seems as if you may have a problem with all of this... not surprisingly when knowing that your emotional life is muddy. I suggest the cut off legs indicate that you feel you cannot support yourself, and lack the confidence to build your life.

Next the dream emphasizes the heads being cut off. The head holds the brain, our ability to reason and think. So, the dream indicates that you feel like you're losing your mind at times, don't know what to do or think anymore.

That the others in your dream ask you to help them, seems to indicate that the muddied emotions may be the consequence of confusion in the mind... perhaps you feel like you have to choose between reason (rationalisation) and the heart, and that the two are distinct. If this is true, then your mind in a way is holding you captive in your emotional turmoil, which is why the tool of rationalism is being cut off, so to help you feel again and trust your feelings in order to make sense of yourself again. Some situations do not require you to think yourself out of it, but to feel your way out of it, and emotional messy situations are such an example.

Be well,

SSR

You guys have many dreams. As I have said in some other posts I don't have many dreams, or more concretely, rarely dream. I find out for myself that when my health is not good, when there are some problems with my internal organs, I may dream but often more than 50% of the dreams are unpleasant.

Sr Mullich, everyone dreams every night. You even dream 4-5 times per night. However, there's a perfect physical reason why you don't know that you dreamt at all. During dream sleep (REM-sleep) our memory store functions get turned off. If you sleep all the way through a dream and wake up in another phase of your sleep (the non-REM sleep), then you cannot even remember you had a dream because it was never even stored up in the first place. People only remember their dreams because they wake up during this REM-sleep, and short term memory storage kicks into gear instantly again. When you are ill, you probably are more easily woken up during this REM-sleep, while you're dreaming, and thus the reason for the sensation that you only dream when you're ill. And yes, because you are ill, your dreams would be more likely to be troublesome. When I'm nauseous or have a fever, then my dreams are filled with elements that emphasize the nausea or fever.