Talking to a T-Rex ends a nightmare

When I was in grade school, I was plagued by dinosaur dreams every night. Almost qualifying as nightmares, these dreams involved me running away from a dinosaur, usually a small T-Rex. In the dreams, my legs got tired and it felt as if I was trying to run through molasses... and I could feel the dinosaur's breath on my back as it caught up to me. I always woke up just before the thing caught me, soaked in sweat and unable to get back to sleep before the alarm clock went off and I had to get up for school. Needless to say, the mornings after these dreams were not very productive for me at school, since I hadn't gotten any sleep and couldn't concentrate on anything other than the dream.

I read constantly as a kid, and the subject of dreams fascinated me. I learned that nightmares were more important than pleasant dreams, because a nightmare was scary on purpose: To make you remember the dream. Nightmares always contained an important message, and it was up to the dreamer to decipher it by stripping away the scary images and getting down to the core idea.

In one book I read, the author recommended trying to turn around and look at whatever was chasing you and ask it what it wanted. This involved a certain amount of control, because a dreamer usually didn't have the presence of mind to behave rationally in a nightmare-- nightmares usually involved fear and running away. This author explained what lucid dreams were, (dreams in which the dreamer can control what happens next) and how to increase the chances of having one. If you could turn your nightmare into a lucid dream, you could literally speak to the monster (your subconscious mind) and find out what the problem was. I decided that I would try to turn around and look at the dinosaur the next time it chased me.

The dinosaur dream returned a few nights later, and as usual, I started running away. A few seconds into the dream, I somehow remembered that I was supposed to turn around, so I did-- and I was shocked at what I saw! It was a small T-Rex, all right... but he was carrying a math book! I woke up laughing. Math was my worst subject, and I really HAD been 'running away' from it by failing to do my homework and by barely passing tests. Well, that sure explained the nightmares of being chased! After that, the dinosaur dreams went away for a few years.

But then I got to high school, and a whole new set of problems arrived. I felt overwhelmed by the work load and the higher expectations that my teachers and my parents had for me. The dinosaur dreams came back, but this time I couldn't seem to remember to turn around in the dreams. I continued to have sleepless nights and walked around school in a daze. I was failing almost every class, and now had to deal with depression, too. I had no clue as to what I wanted to do when I graduated, and I was being pressured to choose a career path. As you might guess, the dinosaurs in my dreams got bigger, meaner, and faster.

One night I dreamed that I was walking to my old junior high school and a T-Rex was chasing me. My legs were burning as I got to the intersection, and I couldn't catch my breath. Cars were speeding down the road and I realized that the dinosaur was probably going to catch me if I had to stop and wait for the cars to go by. I didn't care anymore-- I was too damned tired! I stopped and turned around to see an 8-foot-tall T-Rex trotting up to me. "Go ahead and kill me right now," I yelled at it. "I'm just too damned tired to run any more!" I waited for the thing to devour me.

But it just stopped, cocked its head to one side, put its hands on its hips, and GRINNED at me! "Well, you finally learned something!" It said. Then I woke up.

It was as if a spell had been broken; I never had another dinosaur dream. When I thought about that last dream, I realized that I had been walking to my old school-- in a sense, I had been regressing, going back to my junior high school when I was actually in high school. I had been running away from two things, the dinosaur AND the high school! Asking the dinosaur to kill me and 'get it over with' was an acknowledgement of my depression at the time.

In an odd way, those dinosaur dreams helped me realize that I did have the power to change my life, and that I could control my own mind. I felt very powerless at the time, and being able to yell at a dinosaur gave me a boost in self-confidence. Being smirked at by a T-Rex is something you never forget!