How a TV Series helped me with my nightmares
Watching a series on TV in the living room which involved people with wings, flying and red devil faces pretty much didn’t make sense to my parents, whenever they would glance at the screen when I watched Lucifer. They thought it was science fiction until I sat them down and explained the plot of Lucifer and how it actually helped me get rid of my nightmares. Stay with me here until that sentence makes sense.
For those of you completely unaware of the series, it revolves around the story of Lucifer Morningstar played by Tom Ellis, the Devil, who abandons Hell for Los Angeles where he runs his own nightclub named Lux and becomes a consultant to the Los Angeles Police Department (LAPD). To add context to that, many Christians believe the Devil was once a beautiful angel named Lucifer who defied God and fell from grace. This assumption that he is a fallen angel is often based on the book of Isaiah in the Bible which says, “How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning!
What does this have anything to do with my nightmares? I am going to get soon into it.
Considering that Lucifer is the ruler of Hell, there is descriptive imagery brought in about the concept of hell in this series. Also, note that he is not evil and he actually punishes the evil. Not only does the ruler himself describe what hell is like but there are also scenes of hell in the series that gives us a lot of clarity on what hell looks and feels like. To give it to you in one sentence
Hell is the manifestation of your own guilt, playing in an infinite loop
No frying pans, no scary monsters. The biggest torturer one could have in their lives and even after, is their own mind and what better way to create pain than to project the guilt and regrets of our own minds?
After I came across this depiction of hell, I soon realised and analysed the pattern of my nightmares and realised that they are not really nightmares and just dreams. Dreams surface our deepest desires and fears and for me, they would surface and play in a loop, until I’d wake up all sweaty and scared in the midnight. It had almost become a strong pattern and started to really bother me.
This is when I realised that I was stuck in my own dream loop, which merely manifested and showcased my own fears and desires born in my own mind. To share a little more with you, my dreams were quite poetic in nature too. It would revolve around a central theme and would play over and over again with the change in scenes and costume every time. I would have dreams in my dreams until I’d actually wake up in panic.
Now that I have specified the details of my dreams to you, let me tell you how I dealt with it using Lucifer. In the series, they mention that one has to deal with their guilt, take actions towards it and work with it in their minds, until they feel detached from the entirety of it. This requires a huge part of acceptance, making the right choices and comprehending the concept of consequences and outcomes and acknowledging how much we really had a part in it.
The more denial I had, the more intense my dreams would get. The closer I walked towards self-forgiveness, a concept my dad introduced me to, the less intense my dreams started getting. I started with accepting my fears and let them play in my mind when I was wide awake. I stopped fighting those thoughts and started to listen to them and address them. I noticed the change in the pattern of my dreams and their frequency.
With time, I started embracing things that I was once in complete denial of and started feeling responsible for every emotion and thought that would run in my head. It was and still is a very liberating process. The biggest learning I had was to stop suppressing my emotions and process them the right way.
I would ask myself the right questions. For example, whenever I would see a pile of dead bodies in my dreams, which I have (Sorry you had to imagine that), I realised that it is a mix of my unprocessed grief of my grandparents passing away which actually occurred from the guilt of not having spent enough time with them and the fear of life in itself, which is so uncertain knowing that we could lose anyone at any moment of life.
You know it or not, our fears start affecting our words and decisions and that’s no good way to live. One can’t make choices and decisions based on insecurities and self-doubts. Luckily for me, my mind would project it right to me in my dreams so that I could actually work towards it.
You are probably wondering what insecurities a 23-year-old could have. As much as anyone else at any age. Strained relationships, loose ends and unattained closures, loss of dear ones, uncertainty about the future. Think about it. Have you also had dreams where your ink runs out when you are writing an exam, or if you are trying to speak but your voice can’t come out, if you are screaming and no one can hear you or if you are falling off of stairs or in a pool going down. These are your deep suppressed emotions that you have to process until you set them free.
Here is where another concept introduced in Lucifer actually made huge sense. The process of self-actualization. Going by definition it means, the realization or fulfilment of one’s talents and potentialities, especially considered as a drive or need present in everyone. In the context of Lucifer, God’s favourite son and angel Amanediel starts losing his powers at one point in time and thinks it is a punishment from God for his actions. Later he realises that angels self-actualise and it was his own guilt that made him weak. After he dealt with it, he was able to get his powers back.
Of course we humans don’t need or have powers. But we all self-actualise as well. Our thoughts and perceptions of ourselves make us or break us. That is most definitely not up for debate. The more confident you feel about yourself, the more confident you in turn become. The more you doubt your self-worth, the more demeaning your life becomes.
You are doing all of it to yourself. You are making or breaking you.
So, having understood that, what can you do about it?
Start with acceptance, self-forgiveness. Stop carrying the baggage of the past and fears of the future. Build bridges where you need to and break them where it is healthy to. Stop blaming or taking the blame, stop feeling sorry and guilty and address what the emotion really is. I wish I could say life is really short but it’s not when you are stuck in an endless loop in your own mind.
Liberate your thoughts and liberate yourself. And if possible, watch Lucifer so that we can talk about it endlessly.
