Epic Dreams
With this kind of dream, we are likely to be in for the long haul. These dreams tend to be slow-burning and are likely to get increasingly complex – like a long, Russian novel. We are being taught slowly and carefully, because the lesson to be learned is not simply—like most of the problems and dilemmas we face during our waking life (Bergquist and Mura, 2011). We are in for the long-haul because Epic dreams can be profound, with long-lasting repercussions and life-changing potential. Even if these dreams are not life-changing, they can be exhausting. After a night spent playing out and replaying an epic, we may wake up not recalling the epic but knowing that something happened that interrupted a relaxing night of sleep.
Personally, I find the long and slow-moving epic dreams to be highly generative. These are the dramatic, linear enactments that fill books about dream content and that inspire novels, theatrical productions, and movies. The dreamer is usually an observer of this epic enactment. To quote a line from the Broadway musical, Hamilton, the dreamer “is in the room where it happened,” and this is sufficient. They don’t have to be an active participant, though we occasionally find that we are playing an epic role as a hero or as a tragic victim. When we do play a role in the epic dream, it might be a sign that our ego has gotten a bit too big!!!
Nightmares
The first dream I presented in the second essay in this series (Bergquist, 2023a) was a nightmare. It concerned the dreamer facing a horrible image (the ‘Pelican” beak) of her face in a mirror. And then she sought to escape from this horror, only to find herself rolling in a wheelchair off the end of a bridge into a vast nothingness. According to the American Psychological Association, a nightmare is “a frightening or otherwise disturbing dream in which fear, sadness, despair, disgust, or some combination thereof forms the emotional content.”
Most of us wake up quite suddenly from nightmares because they are torturous. Like all torture, these nighttime tortures can come in many forms: slow, agonizing torture or fast, highly painful torture. Some nightmares are fast-burning, shocking, often surprising, and recoverable. They are like a horror movie that is filled with nasty folks leaping at us from behind the closed door. Other nightmares play out like a Shakespearean tragedy. They mix the nightmare with an epic dream form. We are fortunate to be observers of this tragedy.
However, this is not always the case. In some nightmarish dreams, we are slowly being torn apart by evil forces and must at some point cry “uncle!” We wake up in a sweat and dread going back to sleep, with the expectation that we will be repeatedly abused, humiliated, or at least threatened. Our fear is based on the complexity and long-burning nature of the terror we are facing when asleep. Even when we are awake, the terror haunts us. We regress to our childhood fears of a boogieman lurking beneath our bed.
