Narcissistic abuse affects both the conscious and subconscious mind. It alters your current conscious reality and reshapes it according to the narcissist’s excessive desires and needs. Your new conscious reality includes feelings of inferiority, over-activation of your fight/flight mechanism, isolation from your family and friends, and above all, persistent and relentless psychological attacks.
Whether the narcissist showers you with love, judges you, ridicules you, manipulates you, subjects you to long speeches, or forces you to act in accordance with his desires, his attack is constant and suffocating.
This naturally affects your dreams, because dreams represent messages and symbols from your subconscious mind aimed at rehabilitating your soul. It is not rare for victims of narcissistic abuse to have dreams that make them feel suffocated and confined, where they are trapped inside a narrow, gradually narrowing tunnel, or inside a small box or coffin from which there is no escape.
Another type of dream is the pursuit of something unattainable. You may try to find something that you are sure exists, but it remains out of reach, or you may try to prove yourself in a random way and do not achieve the desired success. You may wake up feeling intense despair or unsettling terror. You may also wake up in a state of panic. These cases all exemplify the symbolic dynamics of narcissistic abuse.
Your dreams are trying to alert your conscious mind that you are in a situation that is detrimental to your mental health. Your dreams are like smoke warning you that there is a fire in your subconscious because:
You are suffocated and controlled, and
You’re trying to get a love that doesn’t exist and will never exist.
Your dreams show you, through symbols, that you will not achieve what you seek with this person. It is a message to you to set boundaries, and to work on changing your reality, as this is the only way to relieve the psychological pressure you feel.
