Hindrances

I've noticed in the past that when I meditate intensely over a period of time, the process stirs something in the depths of my mind that manifests as nightmares.  How to deal with this, I'm not sure.  When it first happened, I tended to associate the dreams with my own past, in this life; unresolved stuff from childhood (and heaven knows there was enough of that) rising to the surface.  Indeed, a lot of old memories and feelings did arise, and I suspected the Buddhist purification practices I was doing around that time might be having this effect.  The work of dealing with all this seemed like a very necessary "taking out the garbage" so I used all the tools available, spiritual, psychological, social. 

But now, most of the garbage is out.  And yet something remains.  This life?  Past lives?  Beats me.  Maybe not any of those.  And now, something new seems to be setting off the bad dreams.  Every night since I began the project to organize my life a bit better (mentioned in my previous entry) I've had disturbing dreams.  The first few nights, the dreams were not particularly intense - identifiable as bad dreams more in terms of contents than feeling -  but two nights ago it got much worse.  So there I am - more work to do, clearly.

There is, however, a positive side to all this - because somehow, the arising of bad dreams flags my project as something powerful and worth doing.