DREAMS SO-OCD

Hello! You’re not alone, disregard the dreams, I know you can feel very upset and disgusted, or sometimes you don’t even do anymore but not because you’re accepting those thoughts but because you’re mind is tired of fighting against them! Your real self is hiding behind the disgust, stress and anxiety this dreams causes. And I know this might be contradictory because you might think “if I don’t fight against it i must don’t care” Believe me, the less you care about it, the more you care (if that makes sense) Please always disregard those kind of dreams, you’re here, writing and trying to figure it out, that’s you! Someone trying to save himself, someone trying to heal

Hi friend! I’m sorry you’re dealing with this. I know how you feel, I’ve been caught in the dream cycle before. Speaking scientifically, we don’t really “know” exactly what our dreams mean. However, it is true that our dreams are a way for our brains to process the information from the day. If you have intrusive thoughts and lots of compulsions in a day, it absolutely makes sense for those to appear in your dreams as well. It’s like throwing your brain activity from the day in a blender and the main ingredient is your OCD theme, the “smoothie” (dream) is gonna be OCD flavored. 😆 And it sucks because our first reaction upon waking with anxiety is to try to “figure out” the dream, which gets you caught in a pattern of compulsions, which is going to end up in your dream smoothie the next night, and so it goes. It’s so awful, I don’t want to minimize that. My absolute best advice would be (if you’re not already) to do exposures around your OCD theme with a therapist because it really does teach you how to sit with that uncomfortable feeling of anxiety, which will help you be able to endure those anxious mornings and help you resist compulsions. The goal is not to NOT feel anxious anymore, it’s to be able to teach your brain that these thoughts are not a threat to you. For me, this really helped over time when I was actually practicing sitting with the anxiety. It helped me get out of a 5 month long cycle of waking up every single day with anxiety. Now, I still have the occasional bad day where I will give into compulsions, and I notice that usually I’ll have a scary dream, then I have to make the choice to reduce compulsions. I notice that when my daily compulsions are few, my dreams don’t bother me or I don’t even remember them. All that to say: I know how you feel, dreams are correlated with compulsions throughout the day in my opinion, the “meaning” of your dream is irrelevant in this context because trying to solve it seriously doesn’t help long term, and sitting with the anxiety and doing exposure work really helps. Sending lots of love and strength! I know it’s so hard 🩷