The Nightmare I Had About My Husband When We Were Dating
By: Emily Jennings
Tags: Spirituality, Mental Health, Psychology, Self Improvement, Dreams

The Nightmare I Had About My Husband When We Were Dating

Dream symbolism, chakras, overcoming trauma, and blocked emotions

Photo by Peter Kasprzyk on Unsplash

It was arguably one of the scariest experiences of my waking or dreaming life. I’ll never forget the dream. It happened a couple of months after we had met. I woke up screaming at the limit of my lungs, my adrenaline pumping. This was the dream:

Walking down a hallway to my apartment door, I looked into another apartment that was next to mine. I knew it was his place. The door was ajar, and so I poked my head in for a moment. There were a few workmen inside, and he was nowhere to be found. The workmen were pulling out pipes and breaking the plumbing, kneeling down like savage beasts under the kitchen counter and tearing up the walls with tools in their hands.

This may seem like a silly thing to be terrified about. And it didn’t make sense to me, either, when I woke up. Why was I so frightened by plumbers?

Since then, I’ve realized a lot about the symbolism in that dream — and a lot about my soon-to-be ex-husband.

Only through loving ourselves can we understand our emotions, and only through understanding emotions can we begin to heal.

Dream Interpretation

Upon googling “plumbing” in dreams, I found that it symbolizes the flow of emotion and feelings. Water in dreams, in general, relates to emotions. I thought about it for a long time.

Emotions should freely flow, and with that movement comes self-knowledge. When we love, cry out in despair, feel relief, and react in anger, our emotions should be unrestricted. That doesn’t mean they should be out of control or unpredictable, but when we feel no reservation about their existence in us, we truly understand our own spirits.

We come to know our trauma by acknowledging emotion. If we can face our past with the willingness to open up to the pain we’ve experienced, then we can begin to work through it. Knowing it is the first step.

If the plumbing of our emotions is blocked, then the flow stops and we are lost in the stagnation of ourselves. We can’t feel the way we should, so we can’t move through life with an open heart and joy.

If the plumbing is being ripped out violently, like in the dream, then someone has sabotaged the flow of emotion. I am an empath, as I have learned recently. I had this dream as a walk through this man’s energy and psyche. I saw with my dream eyes the most terrifying vision I can imagine seeing: the destruction by an outside force of someone’s innocent and functional humanity. You see, someone was in there wreaking havoc on his ability to deal with his emotions, and that person came along before I was ever in the picture. He was ruined before he even had a chance to start. He didn’t even have the self-awareness to rid himself of these evil plumbers.

Chakra Spirituality

Emotions are related to the sacral chakra. In this article by Kimberly Fosu, this chakra is explained: it allows us to relate to the world around us through creativity, desire, and feeling. Not surprisingly, this chakra is also associated with the water element.

We are such complex creatures when it comes to emotion, and we need to be kind to our sacral chakras in order to be good at analyzing and understanding ourselves. Emotions need to be able to flow through us, giving rise to thoughts and actions gracefully, harmonizing our existence with the world.

When the sacral chakra is blocked or out of balance, we lose our ability to solve problems in our world. We can no longer sort through our feelings clearly to be able to see a path forward. We can no longer maintain relationships beneficially, and we begin to destroy what exists around us.

In my dream, I saw the sacral chakra in ruin — the water could no longer flow in the pipes. The emotions were stuck. They couldn’t get to their destination. My soon-to-be-ex has such an out-of-balance sacral chakra, it was truly terrifying to behold. It was like looking at a horror movie.

Photo by Vladimir Fedotov on Unsplash

Final Reflections

What can anyone do about these things? I spent years trying to heal him, but he seemed intent on destroying the love we had. As if there was some gremlin plumber inside him destroying every channel of emotion and love as soon as it began to flow, he would shut down at the first sign it seemed to be working out. He self-sabotaged.

When you sabotage yourself, you sabotage your relationships. When your emotions are blocked or mangled, you cannot find a path forward in life.

This is why it’s so important to look deeply within and start the healing now.