Once upon a not-so-long time ago, I would have dreams about being back in my secondary school building and with my friends at the time. Most of the time, they were pointless dreams without a purpose as I remember I would not really be doing anything besides hanging out with these people or walking somewhere together aimlessly. It was often the exact dream on different days and I never really thought much of it whenever I woke up. Until a specific time when the frequency of those dreams increased and even though I couldn’t explain it, my gut knew that something didn’t feel right. I knew that it wasn’t a harmful dream but I felt that it wasn’t completely harmless either.
Then on a random day, I must have watched a TikTok or Youtube video or perhaps it was even a reddit comment, I can’t remember exactly and it was that content that opened my mind to a whole new different interpretation of this specific dream. The author talked about having similar dreams as mine and after seeking guidance, they found out that the recurrent dream represented subjugation in a specific part of their life. Then and there, a bulb lit in my head. At first, not at the author’s obvious correspondence with my own dream but at the sheer possibility that the dreams could have been a pointer to something else that I had never considered at all.
That was my first encounter with redemption. It’s important to state that at the time I used to have these frequent dreams, I was at a point in my life most people would recognize as stagnancy but many of the occurences at the time felt beyond my control. After this revelation and as many awakening journeys often go, I had a conversation with an older friend who jolted my consciousness to behavioural manifestations I wasn’t paying attention to; such as ‘not being an active participant in my own life’. Remember that I deeply felt my circumstance was beyond my control? well, it turned out not everything was but I was too emotionally encumbered to make any positive realizations at the time.
To cut a longer story shorter, my frequent dream had been a message from my subconscious about my reality. My mind was weaving me familiar stories from my past to keep me safe from the uncertainties that weighed me down so much from my current life. Secondary school was a familiar hurdle, one that I had previously crossed and excelled at. My life was simpler, I had friends I cherished and everything had somehow worked out seamlessly up until that point. Therefore, it was the safest haven I could subconsciously manufacture even if it no longer existed in my physical reality. And while it did serve its purpose and made me feel safe, it had come to a point where that purpose now felt like a hinderance. It kept me safe but it also kept me small. My mind couldn’t move past one milestone to the next because it was unsure of uncharted waters so it stayed tethered to the ones that it had previously conquered.
I don’t have these dreams anymore but it took a conscious effort to stop having them. Also, it wasn’t all in a day’s work and I feel especially keen to clarify that because I know how easy it is to want a quick fix. Clearing out the corridors of my mind took me a long time to do because I am the kind of person that holds on to memories. I would keep books of memories of different people/time intact on the shelf of my mind, hoping that I would still find some sort of use for them in my future. Many useless things took so much space and when I ran out, instead of clearing out the super old stuff, I would quietly leave the new books of memories by the door while I “endeavoured” to create space but ultimately fail to do it. I let the old memories have a stronger hold and so they took precedence all the time.
While I don’t think it’s a bad thing to want to keep memories alive, ctrl+del some of them had to be done if I wanted to move forward in my life. I have finally started moving those new books away from the door and onto the shelves where they belong. The old ones are still there in the archives, but they no longer take up the prime real estate of my mind. In this case, letting go doesn’t mean forgetting; it just means consciously making room for more. I’m no longer tethered to the buildings of my old school or the person I was back then. It turns out when you stop trying to live in the past, the future doesn’t look so terrifying anymore. It just looks like the next place you are meant to go.
Follow the channel.