I have been having dreams like that, but in my own case it is, I hope, prelude to finally stumbling upon a sense of self.
Without sharing details–some of this does get quite deep–I have been having odd variants of the running away from something dream.
The phrase titling this post came to me this morning, pondering all this.
The nature of trauma is that it steals life from you, steals emotions, steals possibilities–of hope, of the future, of being fully present.
And until it is fully processed, it creates pressure on your conscious mind. It says “look at me, feel me, deal with me. I’m all alone and you need me.” It is almost literally like “it” has a mind of its own; and given what I have learned about how it is stored in the viscera, in a sort of meta-brain, a primitive, atavistic, very old brain, this is probably not an inapt metaphor.
This is the essence of dissociation, in which our rationality is placed one place, and our innate sensations, our visceral sensations, our gut instincts, placed somewhere else. You become, unnecessarily, divided between man and animal.
I have argued that modern inability to process trauma leads to abstraction, but can we perhaps also posit that the very EASE with which we can absorb ourselves in abstractions–think of what a computer programmer, or intelligence analyst, or accountant does all day–makes it also easier to postpone the reckoning.
If you live a hard, physical life, the trauma may get “processed” by making you mean, but you remember it. You are openly hostile and cruel, and not through removal of emotional connection and passive aggression.