Strategies for deep sleep when you have insomnia

Dreams related to a real life events

I have had a number of dreams all my life with a recurrent theme to them-my mother is angry with me and is pursuing me and I am truly afraid and fleeing the scene. The dreams often focus on my taking a number of actions to elude her and her always popping up despite my best efforts to put distance between us.

These dreams always feature a younger me (as a child, teen, or young adult). Sometimes, they take place in the house that I grew up in Detroit. My family lived in a large 4 bedroom house on a city street. My parents and I had bedrooms in the upper floor of the house along with a bathroom and some closets. My bedroom was oddly shaped with a small hallway leading into a large room.

Flanking the hallway were two small closets for clothes. Besides the main door there was another door in my bedroom that led to an attic room. I explain all this because sometimes in my dreams, I would hide in one of the closets or I would try to block the bedroom door with the doors of the two closets. In other dreams, I would gather up food, clothing and other essentials and try to hide in the attic room.

In other dreams, I have no place to hide. The dreams are just once constant chase sequence, almost like in the movie “The Fugitive” with Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones.

The dreams are in an indirect way related to real life events. My mother and I never engaged in a real life chase. However, looking back, it is obvious she had emotional issues that were never resolved. She was obsessively neat and just as obsessively concerned about other people’s opinions about her family.

She was constantly critical of me while I was growing up and even when I accomplished something, she had a way of belittling it. As I grew up, she was intrusive and did not have good boundaries in our relationship.

I think she had trouble distinguishing where she ended and I began. I am now 53 and my mom is 88. I am her primary caregiver. She is unfortunately limited by short-term memory loss but again there is something more.

When I am in her home, she becomes very dependent. She is capable of doing some basic things like clothing herself but makes a big fuss that she cannot and needs my help. There seems to be a need for her to always be the center of attention. I try to deal with this the best I can but once again, I am dealing with her dysfunction. As I have grown older, the strange dream has been less constant. But every once in a while, I still have it and when I do, it is frightening to me as ever.