I used to have nightmares every night. I remember only seeing something pleasant in my dreams once: a still-life with one exception.

The color scheme of the dream was for babies: light pink, pale yellow, sky blue, white. On top of a fluffy cloud, frozen, sat three objects. A beach ball — on theme for the color scheme — may have been one of them. The thing I remember most was a light blue bear — he was the only thing moving. He rocked side to side, gently, slowly, and predictably. I stared at the scene for a long time — just a pair of eyes, if that. It was non-threatening, but I felt hesitant and uneasy. I still do when I think about it.

The predictability and comfort drummed up suspicion and distrust in me.

I know I felt safer staring at the other still-life dreams I could remember. Grayscale, dripping with darkness, haunted and quiet. I guess I was used to them, and familiarity won.

Many of my dreams were only nightmares because something terrible always loomed over me — the feeling of it turned a benign scene into a complete terror.

One time I stood (as a pair of eyes) on the top floor of a barely-standing house in the middle of the savanna. All the animals were on the top floor with me staring out of the frame of the home — all that was left after what looked like a devastating fire.

Nothing was happening, but I felt the thing looming over me, heavily. A brew of fear and suspicion boiled up inside me and I couldn’t relax. I scanned the savanna for the inevitable coming of an army of zombies who would tear the animals and I apart. Our second floor perch felt like an inescapable island and a death sentence.

But in that dream, nothing ever happened. We stood safely on the second floor of the home looking out. The army never came.

I had many dreams that were brutally graphic, but not more than the ones like the savanna dream. I was in a scene, moving about as a pair of eyes, feeling creeped out.

A few years ago, I had my one and only out of body experience. While I rode a broom around in a dark European square, I felt the creep from my nightmares hovering physically behind me. When I shot back into my body a few seconds after feeling it, I realized I had never turned around to look at what it was. I just let it be back there all these years, hovering, haunting, and keeping me from ever feeling relief from sleep.

I think the thing is like your emotions — the unpleasant ones. The ones we shove away, stuff down and sit on top of. The ugly ones we don’t want anyone to see. The ones that feel like unbearable pain. And if we let them loose, they’ll swallow us through a thousand sharp teeth.

They sit there, where you put them and silently, haunt you. And you feel creeped out. No one likes feeling creeped out, so you do crazy things to escape the feeling of them hovering behind you.

You run around the world, pick up a million interesting talents, never stop moving, isolate yourself, pretend that you’re meant for a grand purpose in life, or that life has a true defined purpose at all. Anything to keep that painful emotion safely tucked away and to be saved from the pain of it. If I just keep looking this way, it will go away.

But it doesn’t.

It stays, and screws your life up. Well, you screw your life up to keep it away.

The really interesting part is that when you lock away painful emotions, you trade ‘freedom’ for numbness. You send a part of you away with it. The more you do it, the less you feel in general — emotionally, mentally, physically. And your connection to yourself starts to whither.

Somehow we think the cost of holding back painful emotions like shame is less than dealing with the shame itself. But the cost is huge. You’re sacrificing yourself and your ability to connect to others, which can have a much more devastating impact than just feeling shitty for a few days or months.

I spent 30 years with my creep hanging behind me in dream-land, and letting it make me into a suspicious, disconnected human being. 

I finally looked at it.

And when I looked, ‘it’ turned out to be a he. He was just a harmless old man following around my light.

And once I saw him, he left, and never returned.

I’ve spent most of my life running from shame. I’ve buried it deep — run all around the world, collected interesting hobbies and traits, convinced myself that I am destined for something meaningful and that life has a definitive purpose all to get away (wink, wink).

But it didn’t work. The shame is still there looming over me, shaping my perspective and ruining my life. I am suspicious, searching for an eminent threat, and there is no threat — it is still just an old man following me around waiting to be seen.

Emotions that you’ve hidden away can run deep, and can be incredibly painful to look at, but the reality is that the only way to get through them is to walk through them. To feel them fully and sit. And sit. And sit. And sit.

It feels awful to look at your painful, old emotions, but if you can take a look, even a brief one, it will start to move, and you will too.