disturbing dreams

Disturbing dreams have been accosting me late at night. Not disturbing dreams in the sense of being creepy or perverted, but merely dreams of times in my past that I don’t really care to relive. I don’t think about these moments during the day, but oftentimes at night, they are so prominent, so vibrant, and even in the dreams I know that I’m dreaming and it’s not reality, but I’m glued to experience everything all over again. I complained to a friend about it, and she said, “Don’t think it’s something supernatural, and don’t look at them as visions. You’ve moved on past those events and conquered those demons. But those moments in your life were so emotionally chaotic, so stressful, so straining that they have embedded themselves in the neural passageways of your brain. You refuse to access those passageways during the day, because you have no desire nor any need to relive those experiences. But at night, your guard is down, and those neural pathways are activated, and the result is these dreams you’ve been having.” Is there really any way to get rid of them? No. I met a guy a few years back who served in Vietnam. He had gone on two tours as a grunt, and he would tell me about how he killed the Viet-Cong in pontoon boats, how they would blow up sacred temples where caches of enemy ammunition and arms were stored. He told me that when he came back, he refused to think about Vietnam during the day, but at night, he lived it out with every sleeping moment. As an older man now (obviously), the war doesn’t really bother him. But at night, when he sleeps, he relives it constantly, and oftentimes he will wake shouting, and his wife—a dear old lady—will hold him and calm him down. Those moments of terror and stress in the jungle cemented themselves in his neural pathway, and they still act within him today. I know there are ways to reconfigure your neural pathways, and I’ve been doing some mental exercises to help do this.