Anxiety As Our Ally

A transformative dream…

I once had a dream that changed my life. I never saw myself or my perceptions of the world the same, after it.

It seemed to be a message from my own spirit; a lesson on the dishonesty and inaccuracies of fear.

It started as a typical anxiety dream.

In it, I lived in a high-rise condo. It was beautiful. My unit had at least two levels, maybe three. I was way up high overlooking a vast ocean of city lights. (This perspective tells me the dream was originating from my highest consciousness.) The view was incredible.

I had just received word that someone had entered the building below and was currently working his way up to kill me, or something equally bad. I had two doors leading into my unit. Both seemed pathetically unfit to stop the intruder.

I went to work trying to fortify them. I wasn’t going to just stand there and allow this maniac in. I chose the weaker of the two doors and was attempting really useless things to reinforce it, like propping an ottoman in front of it, and using a dishtowel to somehow strengthen the lock. I knew it was futile. While I was working on this door, the other door- the stronger of the two- burst open with no effort. I threw the dishtowel in the air and ran to a back room.

This horror entered the condo though he hadn’t found me yet. My terror ran wild. I tried to willfully disappear, something I learned to do long ago–control my own actions in a dream–but I couldn’t. I thought to myself, “Okay, invisibility won’t work. Let’s try elevating beyond his reach.” I can generally float above the danger.

But this wasn’t working either. I couldn’t elevate. I couldn’t fly. I had no power. I was completely demoralized.

I surrendered.

I sulked upstairs to my bedroom. I gave up… surrendered. I was so tired of the fear.

I shut the door quietly and curled up under my covers. Resigned to facing my demise, I closed my eyes and gave into my fear. I fully accepted it. He was going to find me, I was going to be killed, and there was nothing I could do. It felt good to finally just concede the loss. I tried to get a moment’s peace before the bedroom door burst open–which it did just then–and the man rushed at me with full hysteria.

Wild. I just lay there, completely detached, observing my own imminent death. “Come and get me.” I thought. “I’m tired of fighting.”

At that moment the blankets tore off of me, and two strong arms grabbed me. But then I realized, they weren’t so much grabbing me…as cradling me. The source of my terror, a man, picked me up like a feather and said, “This building’s on fire! I’ve got to get you to safety!” Securely in his giant arms, hands loosely clasped around his neck, I gazed into his eyes and squinted with incredulity.

“Huh.” I thought to myself. “Did not see that coming…”

A twisty ending that fully woke me up.

The wake up call.

I sat up in bed, marveling at my realizations.

It’s what we do. isn’t it? It’s human nature. We expend so much energy on fear and preservation and self-protection (which are all useful until they start to dominate our lives) that we fail to see that we’re suffocating ourselves, locking ourselves out of our own gifts and resources. Shutting down our power.

We start to become the agent of the fear, we set forth on a course to our own demise, until we finally see that our actions, our perceptions, our choices are the very things that are harming us the most.

Awareness.

To surrender a hyper need for control is a step toward freedom, though it’s a large step that often takes professional assistance to get to the bottom of. From there we can learn that much of our anxiety is often born out of overactive defense mechanisms, which don’t protect us like they used to, but only serve to fill us with more fear.

(Defense mechanisms develop as a child, during our developmental years, and they are formed for a reason. Children truly have no agency or control over their psychological or physical well being, and when in danger have no choice but to form defense mechanisms. They become suffocating in adulthood, when we now have sovereignty and agency, but our psyche has not healed enough to trust that we can let go of our past strategies for coping or surviving.)