Ramblings & Findings of a Suicide Dreamer

Recently I have been having dreams of suicide. I sleep for a few hours, and I wake up in breathless, dry sobs with no immediate recollection of the scenes I have just witnessed. I lay there, shaking off the dream, slipping back into unconsciousness, and spinning the wheel to see what method lies beneath my eyelids this time around. Another dream; another suicide; another means to an end. More sobs and no tears, just violent heaves of what I have just put myself through.

If you look up what it means to kill yourself in the dream state, it brings forth an explanation that one would never expect. One would assume that killing one's self in a dream means that they actually want to commit that act.

Shortly after recollecting the dreams, I decided to turn to my best friend to discuss these horrific images I was seeing while I was asleep. She, in turn, turned immediately to the web to research what the dreams might mean to try and help me gain some sort of understanding. An understanding that wouldn't necessarily mean facts, but would find a way for me to interpret my dreams for myself and gain some sort of personal enlightenment inside my subconscious mind. I wanted to know if these thoughts were real – if deep down inside I actually wanted to commit suicide. The thought terrified me.

Naturally, being my best friend, she came up with something that gave me some sort of relief and a brief look into some understanding. Her findings are as follows:

“'I Kill Someone, Witness A Killing or Kill Myself'

The central image here is the 'death' of those dream characters. No matter how distressing these images are during the dream, they are almost certainly symbolic pictures of ways in which I am growing and changing, ways in which my life energies are being redirected from old attitudes, perceptions, and self-images. In my experience, it doesn't make a great deal of difference who dies in the dream--if someone or something dies, it signifies that growth and change are taking place. If the dreamer dies, the changes in waking life are likely to be noticeable and radical, and will probably manifest themselves in personality and opinion changes. If it's someone else who dies in the dream, this suggests that the changes are taking place a little further away from the sense of core self --but changes are happening nonetheless.

Suicide in dreams takes on a particularly ironic and positive quality in this sense; it means that the psycho-spiritual growth and development is taking place as a result of conscious choice and decision. For a person in recovery from addictive behavior, for example, to dream of "suicide" is a particularly positive image, because it usually means that this time, the decision to quit is actually going to stick, and the old, addictive personality really is dying.” - Jeremy Taylor, 1996

Although the dreams terrified me, reading this passage helped me to see that maybe my subconscious was trying to tell me something. I have felt really low and down in the dumps for the past several months, and I think that is due to the fact that I have started living this monotonous cycle of a life, and forgetting about the things that truly make me content. Although I am plagued by the negative thoughts a great deal of the time, I have been making an active attempt to become aware of when the negative thoughts are just to barge themselves into the walls of my mind, and I have been combating the negatives with my newfound artillery of positives. While it is hard to always keep up a positive outlook at life, I am taking small steps to remind myself change doesn't just happen overnight.

What I believe the dreams are trying to tell me is that the change that I have been reaching and yearning for, but falling short of is finally happening without me even realizing it. I believe the universe is trying to show me that the things I want but seem to think are out of my reach may just be working to connect with me anyways.

This is the start of a long, well-needed journey for me. I am excited to continue to practice to manifest the right amount of positivity in my life in order to be the person that I know deep down I am truly meant to be.