So my dreams recently have kept me from wanting to go to bed. When I was still in therapy, my counselor suggested they're from PTSD, but never explicitly explained what they meant, or what causes them to start.
Precursor: I left my immediate family Oct. 2018 on very bad terms. I had to take the most important things in a single storage bin. I lived with friends and now on my own ever since then.
General dream: I'm back home with my family. I'm being treated the way they always treated me-- like the bottom of the food chain. They gossip about people they say they love, and yell or punish me as if I wasn't gone for a year. I wonder why I'm back, as I believe my friends who helped wouldn't let me start over and stay with them again.
A more detailed scenario in a recent dream of this pattern:
Possible trigger:
I decided to go home. I had things I wanted back in my life that I couldn’t take originally. Mostly, I wanted to see my family. I knew I’d be manipulated for leaving. I knew my mom would tell me how I’ve destroyed my life and their relationship. But she told me if I ever betrayed her and came back, her arms would be open. I wanted that to be true. But, as I went to my room, I was greeted by my sister. She held a broom handle, and as I got closer, she beat me with it. The pain went on for a while as all her aggressions came out against me. I cried and asked why she was beating me. She made me swear to never come back, then walked away with me on the floor. I cried the rest of my dream. I got up, grabbed a coat I knew was still in my room and tried to leave quietly. My mom, however, was waiting at the front door. She told me to take the coat off, as it was my sister’s now. I took it off and walked to my current home, where everyone saw the blood and welts all over my body. Then I finally forced myself awake.
I don’t know if it is anything more than my brain processing things to an extreme, or if there is something more going on that I’m not catching. The other dream when it’s not so specific is the driving with no brakes. I’ve read what that means, but I don’t know if those are tied together or not. Has anyone else had recurring dreams similar to this? Were they told what it meant, more than just “past traumas”?