Major Mood Disorders welcomes Nadia Parcivy as she describes her story

First of all, I’d like to thank Major Mood Disorders.com for allowing me the chance to document my depression and dreams, as it is something that is important to talk about with others who are also suffering from depression. My dreams have been quite interesting lately, but mostly very shocking. I entered a state of what psychologists and neuroscientists call “REM” sleep, whereby my mind rests in a super duper trance-like state where I may or may not experience lucid dreams (they say that everyone has lucid dreams). I do have lucid dreams, happens so often that when I discussed with my therapist, she had little input, perhaps sometimes more but recently didn’t.

What Depression and its Dreams mean to me

I’m clinically depressed, like the others in this website, I have strong doubts and feel a maddening weight and pressure that impacts negatively my ability to proceed in my life, I’m always traumatized. It started after the terrible death of my young daughter, she was thirteen and had been runover by a car (the driver was absent-minded and he was sent to prison for twelve years with six years of probation). We fought hard in our case and we won but that vengeful feeling will never bring back little Carli. I’ve been suffering from depression for seven years now and the condition doesn’t seem to be getting better. Compounded by depression and dreams, the effect feels even worse. What am I supposed to do? Any ideas?

Last Night’s Depression Dream

Last night I dreamt about something messed up: I was flying (my therapist says that flying dreams are quite common) and felt free, but then the depression started and the dream turned into a nightmare–the depression was so heavy that my wings felt like iron, that this strange feeling kept getting heavier and that I sailed into a nose-dive. I watched as the sky became a tunnel and I was struggling to uplift this massive weight from my back. The sky seemed to become a tunnel, focusing my depression into a single location and path–this is my life, ever since Carli died, the world became narrow my therapist said. I crash landed and broke my wing, the tunnel was filled with nails piercing the ground–I had to walk through it to see what the end of the tunnel. What was it, I wondered, but every step on the nail-packed floor felt like hot coal. It didn’t make any sense why I would dream of a situation like that, but my therapist was eager to say that Carli’s death was symptomatic of my traumatic situation, that the tunnel was my way of finding her through the nails and the hot coal. The world did appear narrow, ever since she died, I only saw myself as a walking zombie waiting to become a part of my Carli.

Often I have lucid dreams due to my depression. My therapist says, “It’s a depression induced dream,” and quickly offered me prescriptions to take. In fact, my depression felt like it was a post partum disorder (PTSD) and sometimes, when I could barely sleep because of my depression and its dreams, I could swear that I see my daughter Carli. I missed her so much and I am not sure what else is left. In these dreams, I see her and I miss her, to walk through that tunnel to find her on the other side feels like a life mission, my destiny to find her as soon as possible.