I dreamed a dream (but not such a great one!)

My subconscious mind must be feeling anxious and stressed in some way. Even though on the surface everything seems fine, the reasons I believe there to still be some underlying anxiety are two-fold: firstly, my eczema seems to be getting worse, not better (someone told me eczema was lined to stress, or I suppose it could be an over-worked liver trying to process all the sugar and wheat I consumed last week???); and the second reasons is the content of my dreams.


Having just jolted awake at 7am – quite unnaturally, too, as I was still mid dream and not inclined to wake up just yet thanks to a late night – I can now recall bits of the dream, the part just before gaining consciousness (I believe it’s called a ‘hypnogogic’ state? I’d never heard of that word before we did a dream feature in the magazine). Anyway, what I can remember is running like mad to get on a train that was due to leave in a few minutes. In fact, I got to the platform with five minutes to spare, saw the train was due to leave from the opposite site and so had to leg it over the stairs that cross the tracks, and down the other side. All the while, what seemed like hundreds of people were hot on my heels, right behind me running down the stairs, also trying to board the same train. And then the train started to move further down the tracks so I was actually running after it, and had to grab the door frame and pull myself in, which I was pretty proud of myself for doing. Once inside, I recalled some advice given to me by a friend not to sit in the front carriage as if there is a crash, that is the one to take the biggest impact so you are most likely to die (!!!), and so started to wander further down the carriages. However, there weren’t any people further down and there were in the first carriage, so I felt drawn back there to sit near to people I thought looked nice. In the end, once the hoards had caught up with the train and gotten on, I ended up sandwiched between two women.
So the underlying feeling of the dream was one of rushing, trying to get somewhere, stressing. And it’s not the first dream I’ve had about trains, or making sure not to miss them. Another comman theme for my night time visions is trying to escape either from a large multi storey car park, a shopping centre, or a hotel. The place always seems to change and I end up getting in lifts to try and reach another floor but often the buttons don’t work, or there isn’t a button for the floor I want, so I end up going round and round. Also there is sometimes someone chasing me (once it was Daniel Craig as James Bond!!!). And occasionally they do catch up with me and I experience panic. Or, the lift plummets down really fast, or the walls of it close in and I feel trapped. Fun huh!!! While not exactly nightmares that leave me sweating profusely on waking, they must be conveying anxiety of some kind.


If I look at my personal life, which has been somewhat circuitous this year – back and forth and not sure in which direction I was or am going – then perhaps this is just being reflected in my dreams: that I still feel lost and directionless, or that there is some sort of rush to get somewhere and I am always struggling with it. Ultimately I suppose it reflects an even stronger need than I thought to just relax and adopt John and Gaia’s F**k It! approach (I know I keep mentioning it and them but I will for a while as I loved that place), and do some meditation or something to still my racing mind. I thought I’d started that process but seems, from the content of my dreams at least, that I have some way to go…

To read more about dream interpretations in Russell Grant’s new column for Soul&Spirit, including his interpretation of one of Katy's dreams, buy the September issue, which is on sale this Friday in Asda, Tesco, Sainsbury, WHSmith, Borders, McColls, and leading independent newsagents (visit soulandspiritmagazine.com)