Lucid Dream #12 — Healing the Inner Child
July 12, 2023
‘I feel so much lighter and am proud of myself for taking control.’
This is a different kind of lucid dream. The reason why I’m practising in the first place. Dreams are very personal and give us insight into our own psyche. It shows us what needs healing. And through lucid dreaming, that can be possible. By interacting with our desires, fears and other aspects of our own psyche, we can actively engage with them, while in waking life, this could be much more difficult. In the dream world, everything is out in the open, and we are safe to work with all aspects of ourselves.
Yes, it’s nice to have fun in lucid dreams, but they hold so much more potential to expand and grow into whole beings, where every aspect of ourselves is integrated to live a more balanced life. And so this particular lucid dream is very special to me. I transformed a very real fear and made peace with a part of my inner child. Let’s get into it.
I’m at an afterparty somewhere in a dormitory, and I’m sitting on a sofa with a few other students. A boy is sitting next to me, and he suddenly touches my thigh with his hand. I freeze, and I feel very uncomfortable. The emotions get too much, and instead of sticking up for myself and telling him off, I get up from the sofa and run outside the building without saying anything. I feel paralysed and repulsed, and I just want to scream. After a while, I realize that it’s raining badly. I look around and find myself on some kind of playground for kids, but it’s all broken and rusty. It looks more like a scrapyard. I find it a bit strange. What is this doing outside a student campus? But I’m too caught up in my own emotions to really care. I see a few people who are smoking staring at me, but I don’t care what they must be thinking either.
I start crying now and run away, feeling the rain streaming over my face. I see a secluded place somewhere that seems dry, so I run towards it. I stop running, lie down on the floor and start crying again. After a little while, my mom suddenly comes running towards me. I feel relieved, but she isn’t sympathetic at all. She starts yelling at me that I can’t just run away from my friends like that. WHAT?! She doesn’t even know why I ran away… how can she say that? I get furious, but before I react, a calmness washes over me. I realize that I’m dreaming. I look at her without saying anything, and I feel so much better as soon as I realize that what happened isn’t real.
Feeling lots better now, I walk back through the playground/scrapyard. It has stopped raining, and the sun shines bright on my face. I feel so much lighter and am proud of myself for taking control. I keep on walking and see a sleeping dog lying on the floor. I feel like it represents the dog that bit me in my face as a child. It’s still the reason why I’m a bit scared of big dogs. It was gruesome. This dog looks different, but I still don’t want to wake the dog up. So I step over him carefully, though knowing that I’m safe in the dream. I keep on walking.
The playground looks all new now, colourful and all. There are even some kids playing here. I feel joyful and childlike myself, and I want to ask these kids about the meaning of my dream. It feels so significant. But instead of bringing up the touchy subject of the start of my dream again, I decide to just enjoy their playful company instead. For a while, I simply watch them play. I feel at ease. I’m near the door I ran out of at the beginning, and my mom walks through it. This time, she seems less judgmental, and I tell her about the fact that we are in my dream right now. I get super excited and want to show her what I can do. I want to take her somewhere. Without thinking, I start spinning around really fast. I’ve tried this before to create a new dreamscape, and it hasn’t worked very well in the past. But this time, it works! The first thing that pops into my head is the pyramids in Egypt, so that’s where we’ll go!
I feel my whole body vibrating in my bed now, I see visuals, and a new place is forming in my head, but I can’t quite seem to grasp the scene and get there. It takes a while, and I feel that I’m stuck between either an astral projection or a wake-induced lucid dream (WILD). I try to visualize the scene more clearly and focus on the visual that’s in front of me. Finally, the new scene comes alive, and I find myself in it. At first, I don’t see where we are, but then it turns into a beautiful cave system full of lights. I know that we are inside or underneath the pyramids. Wow! I’m amazed, and my mom seems to love it as well. She immediately goes out to explore. I feel really proud of myself for finally getting to a new dream location for the first time, and just as I’m off to explore it with my mom, I wake up.
That was such a beautiful dream. It went from a nightmare to a very peaceful lucid dream. The content seemed so real, too. I felt so much better after I became lucid, as I could accept my feelings of sadness and let them go. I love interpreting my own dreams, and I think one can only truly interpret their own dreams by themselves, as a dream language is so unique and personal. I’ve got to be honest that I’m not entirely sure why I dreamed such a horrible thing of someone touching me in the first place. It felt extremely disturbing. And the fact that I found myself on an abandoned playground in the pouring rain tells me that my inner child is involved in this strong emotion. It’s an emotion that stems from childhood.
More and more research is being done on the healing effect of lucid dreaming on trauma, and many people find lucid dreaming a helpful and transformative tool to work with. I have noticed this firsthand a couple of times, too. When dealing with difficulties in our dreams and transforming those emotions or dream outcomes, we actively heal that part within ourselves. The dream space is a safe place to confront our fears, ask them what they mean, and show us how we can heal them. As soon as I noticed I was safely sleeping in my bed and this was a dream, I felt so much better, and I could let that emotion go.
I chose to hang out with the playing children without interacting because I felt that I just needed to give them some space. To give my inner child space to be free, to be a child and nothing more. I don’t like to think back to my childhood as certain things have happened, and the overall feeling I get is rather negative. But I know it’s necessary to heal. This lucid dream was the ultimate opportunity for me to create some space, and ever since this dream happened (it has been a few months now), I feel lighter about my past. Something changed inside me. It’s only small, but big changes start by taking small steps. And that’s why I’m very grateful for this dream!
Flying and breathing underwater in lucid dreams is great and all, but I always encourage people to actively seek out opportunities to heal and connect to their inner child, shadow, higher self etc. through their dreams. This can be so rewarding and make us a better person in the waking world, too!
I hope you enjoyed this story, and I’m very interested to hear about your stories too! Have you ever had a transformative lucid dream where you healed something or faced a fear? Please share it in the comments!
