I have a recurring dream in which I try to turn on the light in a room, but it won’t turn on. Most often, this dream occurs in a room that seems like one of my childhood bedrooms. But not always. Sometimes it doesn’t involve me trying to turn on the lights, but the lights are flickering in an eerie unexpected way. When I try to turn them off or fix them, they seem to have a life of their own.
This past week I had two dreams of “the light won’t turn on;” however, each contained subtle, but meaningful changes from the typical progression of events. I believe these changes are a result of my own dreamwork, and efforts toward noticing and changing patterns of mine in waking life. I also have a sense these are changes for the good.
First off, if you find yourself here on this blog post as a result of searching (as I have a few times in the past) “what does it mean when the lights won’t go on in your dream,” I’ll tell you ahead of time, I don’t know that there is a definitive answer, despite the confidence with which Reddit or Quora posters respond to this question. In general, I don’t interpret or analyze dreams, and also I believe that while we as humans may have dreams with similar themes, the experience and resulting insights vary from person to person. For this reason, my approach to working with others’ dreams is relational, not analytical. If you’re interested in working a dream with this theme, you can always reach out to me about scheduling a one-time session to discuss it.
For me, for many years, a dream in which the light would not turn on fell in the category of “nightmare,” because typically the light not going on was accompanied by a sense of foreboding or actual events in the dream that I interpreted as a “haunting.” For instance, I would enter my childhood bedroom, try to flick on the light switch, and instead of the light going on, other items in the room would move on their own. Or, I would try to turn on a lamp with my hand, and instead of that lamp, other lights in the room would flicker on and off. Over time, I got to a point of low-level dream lucidity where intense fear would arise in me the moment I attempted to turn on the switch and the light wouldn’t go on. At that point, I would experience an “oh shit” feeling of dread; knowing immediately the room I was about to enter was haunted.
Let’s pause here and consider how my experiences in past dreams informed and shifted my behavior in subsequent ones.
It got to the point in my dream life that when I would flick a light switch, and the room would stay dark, I would automatically assume this meant the room was haunted. I would brace myself for some kind of paranormal event. Even when no such event would follow, I would sometimes try to wake myself up to avoid what I was certain was coming.
Even when there wasn’t anything alarming or threatening in the dream following my attempt to turn on the light, a significant feeling of dread would arise. I “knew” what was coming….
Lately, I’ve been noticing in waking life how much dread arises in me without there being any sensorial evidence of peril or threat. It’s become almost a way of being for me, specifically as it relates to parenting my teenage kids, two of whom are on the brink of actual adulthood and independence.
I think there is a connection between the haunting feeling that arises when I find myself in a “lights won’t go on dream” and the dread I sometimes feel in waking life, a condition I often describe as “waiting for the other shoe to drop.” Those of you with anxiety probably know what I mean or have experienced occasions of this. Individuals with C-PTSD are likely very familiar with this feeling, and may experience it as a chronic condition. Something activates us. It could be something very subtle, and yet enough to signal to our system to get ready, be prepared, run, or fight.
I’ve been having this dream for many, many years, and I can’t say for certain that the insights I have about this recurring dream now apply to all the times in the past I’ve had this dream. However, as a result of the changes that occurred in the dreams this week, I’m starting to wonder if these dreams are, at their foundation, more about my fear and mistrust of the unknown than any kind of haunting. And that my behavior in these dreams is indicative of my general reactivity toward meeting such situations in waking life. When things aren’t going as I expect them to or hope they will, I worry, and then I attempt to fix, control, or flee.
But what happens when I can’t fix, control, or flee? Further, what are the longer term consequences of not facing my fear of uncertainty? Who do I become? And what is the impact on others of who I become when I feel out of control and afraid? How are my relationships affected? How is my own short-term and long-term health affected?
Someone who really depends on and has excelled at finding a way to “control” events isn’t necessarily going to notice this about themselves in the dream state unless the dream events are very dramatic. Try to remember a recent dream in which you lost your way or couldn’t find your car or forgot something at home. Most of us are very reactive in these dreams, spending most of them acting out our familiar patterns rather than arriving at deep insights as a result.
The “dream-maker,” so to speak, knows us intimately, and knows that sometimes to really get a point across, we require a scaling up of events, sometimes a supernatural scaling up, in order to interrupt our habitual way of being. It wouldn’t be enough to, let’s say, feed you a dream of forgetting your locker combination. You’ll just get stuck in the same old pattern of searching your backpack for the piece of paper your wrote it on, or going to the payphone to call your mom, etc. etc.
I wonder if the light switch not working dreams, for me, are my own dream-maker’s attempt at getting my attention when less dramatic attempts at showing me my fear of uncertainty have already been made unsuccessfully.
In this week’s two dreams of lights not going on, I did something unusual. I asked for help.
In the first dream, earlier in the week, I was scared at first, but then what arose in me was a kind of acceptance — oh, this again — and a willingness to meet whatever was about to take place. It’s not like the “oh shit” feeling was absent, but it was there with less dread. There was also a sense of “I don’t know that I am capable of meeting whatever is happening right now on my own,” and awareness of being in over my head. At some point, rather than continuing to try to turn the lights on, I called downstairs to a family member for help, and they came.
In the second dream, later in the week, there was only the slightest sense of dread before I called out to a friend to help, to bring me some new lightbulbs because the lights seemed to be out. I knew there was a possibility a haunting was imminent, but I allowed for the possibility of it just being a case of burned out bulbs.
The friend brought me some new lightbulbs, but changing the lightbulbs didn’t get the lights to work. Darn it. I guess the dream-maker saw past my ruse of “calling for help.” Really, I was still just trying to fix the problem. But when I yanked the metal pulls, none of the lights turned on. I simply left the room and went to go find my friend. When I woke up from this dream, I wasn’t left with the feeling that I’d just had a “scary” dream. Challenging, yes, and a little foreboding, but not terrifying.
In both dreams, the two remarkable changes were (1) my calling for help and (2) my willingness to be with the fear longer than I have been able to before without catastrophizing or determining the situation was “supernatural.” The help I asked for made me feel less alone and, as a result, enabled me to meet the situation whatever it was and my fear of it, instead of trying to control it or immediately escaping.
In dreams and in waking life, there is an opening for change when we feel safe enough to allow our fear to rise up, to be with whatever is, or to ask others to accompany us during our fear or to help us meet it.
“I don’t want to be alone” is something my teenage daughter says to me when she feels sick. Even in my own overwhelm or concern during these moments, I so admire her ability to know this about herself and to say it out loud. For most of my life, I have been completely unwilling to acknowledge this about myself or say it aloud. In fact, I probably have strived more for the opposite — to be independent to a fault, to know my way out of every situation in advance just in case.
In fact, I’ve worn as a badge of pride my seeming ability to manage life and life’s obstacles alone. My dreamwork over the last few years, however, has shown me time and again that my fixation on “managing,” and managing alone, is often to my own detriment. In a balanced way, independence is an extremely necessary skill. Unbalanced, however, extreme independence and belief in one’s own ability to manage alone can lead to stagnation, and, many times, to pain, loneliness, and sadness.
In my opinion, the dream of the light not going on is not a symbolic dream even though there is some good symbolism there with light and dark, known and unknown, seen and hidden.
Rather this dream is a real ongoing experience for me — and probably for you — in which real fear arises that we choose to meet in a certain way or suppress in another way or fix or manage or change. Maybe for you, it’s a different reaction. Maybe your reaction is a freeze response. Maybe “confusion” becomes your distraction from your fear.
I invite you, the next time you have a dream of this sort, to write the dream down immediately upon waking. Once you do, circle the actual events in the dream: the activity you witness and experience through your senses. Notice which events of the dream are actual to the dream itself and which parts are simply “known” to you, without evidence. The parts we seem to know without evidence are the ones we want to question. These may point us to our patterns, our habitual ways of thinking, and our reactions. Perhaps working with this recurring dream of “the lights won’t go on” will encourage another dream of this sort, but with changes.
My one piece of strong advice is to not attempt to become lucid or control this type of dream, despite your fear. I know this contradicts a lot of the lucid dreaming literature out there. Yes, lucid dreaming can be fun, and also empowering. However, for those of us who have a tendency to use control as a means of suppressing or managing our emotions, lucid dreaming can be obstructive. Letting the dream play out instead, and allowing yourself to feel and respond as you would can be much more revealing and educational, especially when we track and work our dreams ourselves or with a practitioner.
My big takeaway this week from this set of dreams is a reminder that there is another way to relate to uncertainty that is an opposite of sorts to the “other shoe is about to drop” type feeling. That way of being is called “cautious optimism.”
The fact is: the other shoe hasn’t dropped yet. We with anxiety or a traumatic past have been conditioned to anticipate the second shoe dropping as a means of protection. But what we eventually learn is that we can’t know everything or protect ourselves and our loved ones from everything. Attempting to do so can itself cause harm.
The act of asking for help in a dream is one step closer to adopting a cautiously optimistic outlook about what’s to come, even in our uncertainty. It’s a change of habit in myself I would very much welcome.
(Feature image, photo credit: Jen Sonstein Maidenberg)
