Facing Fear in my Dreams

I've had a couple of interesting dreams that I would to share. The first one occurred two nights ago.

It was as though I was partially aware of myself inside of my mind. The space was dark and also light with some objects and at least one slightly scary presence. I experienced a moment of fear, and then I guess I realized that there was opportunity here for me to have a look at what fears I have been carrying around inside of me, like those little frightening images that I would occasionally be startled by when they popped up in scary movies.

So I said to myself, let's see what it is that I've allowed myself to fear. Then suddenly in front of me, objects or pictures of objects began to appear. They were for the most part silly little things that I guess I have reacted to in fear over the years. The one that I remember most was like a a baby doll looking at me with black eyes and a chunk missing from its bloody head. One by one and very quickly, the objects appeared and disappeared like holographic images in the darkness in front, and this time I stared at each of them without fear.

Then suddenly, there I was hanging on the edge of a ledge of a wooden balcony of sorts. As the broken wood splintered and the planks started to careen, a baby wrapped in a blanket appeared next to me. With my right arm, I grabbed hold of the child, and I knew inside me that I was determined not to let it fall. As the ledge tilted even further, I was hanging there, my left hand holding on by a branch or something, and in my right arm, the child. I thought that perhaps I didn't have the strength to with one arm raise us both up to safety; yet I also realized that perhaps I could, and so I did, and when I looked at the baby again, it was a different child.

Something to note about what I have just written: when I began a few moments ago, I hadn't remembered the second part of the dream until I began to physically write it out; interesting how many points open up once one begins to write them out.

In the next dream that I had just this last night, I was walking along when I recognized two other people. I guess we were both walking in the same direction when one of them suggested that we walk though the local nuclear power plant. I said something like, I have already walked through the local non-nuclear power plant and there's no way they are going to just let us stroll through a high security nuclear one.

As we were walking up some stone stairs with a stone wall on our left and a drop straight down into what seemed to be blue water, something with a body that may have been light-brown, jumped up from the water and wrapped a snake-like tentacle around me. 

With the snake-like tentacle wrapped around me and a fish head at the end of it trying to poke me in the face, this thing seemed to be trying to pull me down off the stairs. As I was struggling to hold on and not be pulled off the stairs, I was holding onto the fish-head in front of my face and trying to break it off. Suddenly with a jerk and a tear in my lower back, I was out of the dream, and that's how I woke – with a pain in right side of my lower back.