by centerpath » Wed Oct 22, 2014 7:46 pm
I think a BPD diagnosis can suggest a simplistic model for our complex lives.
If you're having sleep and nightmares, then they're part of what you're working with, regardless of diagnosis. I too have nightmares and dreams so vivid that I sometimes need to wake up for relief. When it's really bad sleep is less restful than waking. Happily for me, most of that has passed.
In my opinion sleep is fundamental to our healing and growing. Not just in cliche sense that we need sleep to be well, though that's true.
I believe that our waking self knows and feels and things and sees, and then our unconscious or sleeping self does other work that's difficult or impossible while waking. For me accepting this has helped create kind of a process. When trauma or overwhelming emotions arise, I try to just know them, see them, not judge. Just be a kind of observer. Then in the sleep that follows over the next few days, inner work occurs from this knowing.
There's a point to all this. Sorry for rambling. I'd suggest that these dreams are something that's needed right now, but importantly they're about now and not necessarily about self. Go with where they're taking you, and the inner work will get done. No reason to think that such dreams are a permanent feature of life in their current intensity.