How to Play and Dream Again: Healing From Grief and Trauma

After grief and loss and trauma, how do we dream again? How do we look forward to a bright future when flashbacks of the past paint such a heavy coat of fog over the picture?

Grief and Trauma Flashbacks

We’ve been through the ringer, to put it mildly. 5 moves in 5 tumultuous years. Losing my husband in the middle of one of those moves. Packing up again right after we buried him. Moving and loss of a loved one are the tippy top of the Richter scale of stress on a body and mind. In a few short years, we’ve experienced enough of both moving and loss than many experience in decades.

Grief and trauma do a number on a person’s ability to dream. Instead of dreaming forward, flashbacks often anchor someone back to a tragedy in the past. Even though the calendar keeps ticking forward, someone stuck in a trauma loop relives the same horrible day over and over. Like Groundhog Day meets a horror film.

Hope and Healing in Unexpected Places

I’ve been doing research on trauma and how to heal from trauma for years now. And the best and most hopeful things I’ve learned are that PTSD does not have to be a death sentence. It’s not incurable. Post Traumatic Growth is just as real, and even total deliverance and healing are possible! Praise Jesus who breaks off every chain!

I’ve also learned that PLAY is the opposite of trauma. Play helps the brain heal and restore new and healthy neurological pathways.

But as adults, how do we play again?

Whether we are dealing with severe trauma or simply the secondhand traumas of living in this fallen news-riddled world, that needs to be our question.

How can we have more fun?

How can we play again?

Dream Dates

One of the best bits of marriage advice we received from our beloved Ken and Sallie was to pray together every night and to never stop dreaming together. So we went on dream dates.

Dream dates are where you go out together and purpose to dream together.

We loved going to Barnes and Noble or Poor Richard’s or The Tattered Cover. Any establishment filled with books. When we couldn’t travel abroad, we would do so in books together just down the street from our home. We opened books about New Zealand and Italy and Brazil. We dreamed of where we would go. We wrote bucket lists together. We flipped through Pottery Barn books and dreamed of how to rearrange the living room. Or we walked through Sherwin Williams and played with paint chips, dreaming of what colors we could paint the front door or the baby’s room.

We also dreamed of the people we wanted to serve and in what capacity and in what locations. We dreamed up fun ways to bless others on our first Valentine’s together and how we can bless widows we knew on Mother’s Day. We dreamed of how we could bless our small group and neighbors and family. We came up with the silliest Christmas gift ideas during our dreaming sessions.

We were like those who dreamed dreams.

When Dreams Die

But something I’ve learned with loss is that some dreams really do die with the dreamer.

I’ve also learned that some of those dreams are a gift from the dreamer and can be lived on in their legacy.

There are things my late husband and I dreamed of for years that just are not in the cards now without him. But there are other dreams we dreamed together that are still possibilities, woven into my hopes for the future. Those dreams are laced in his legacy and his vibrant joy and love of life. And keeping those dreams alive likewise keeps me alive.

Fighting for Hope

Yes, dreams have to shift and change after loss, and that’s ok. But we must fight for our dreams and not let them all die when such a huge part of us dies. After loss, we fight to breathe and force ourselves to eat some food and we must likewise try to dream again.

We must put our hope in God’s goodness, of course. But we must also trust that even though we’ve grown too familiar with loss and crises and trauma… we must trust that’s not the end of our story. Trust that God’s goodness will also be accompanied by seeing goodness in the land of the living in our very own lives. We must hope in a new chapter. And I wonder if our defiant radical choice to dream again might just be the hand that turns the page.

Play and Dreaming

I am coming to believe that when I was a small child and played Barbies and Ninja Turtles and designed my dream home in sketches and played house, I wasn’t just playing. I was dreaming. I was learning how to become a dreamer. And in our own more grown-up way, flipping through books of international cuisine and travel was our own accessible way of playing together.

Dreaming is a type of play that any grief-stricken, level-headed, exhausted adult can still engage in. I bless you to dream again. Last night, I realized that we are too frozen and too worn thin to turn the next page in our story. We just want to lay down and sleep forever.

The Lord says that, “Without vision, the people perish,” (Proverbs 29:18). And I felt that deep in my soul last night. We were withering away for lack of vision, lack of dreams, lack of hope of what could be.

So I prayed a simple desperate request, “Father, give us vision.”

I needed God to set our hearts to see what He can see. I needed his help to dream again. And I woke up dreaming and seeing possibilities that weren’t there yesterday. And hoping that dreams are what might turn the key and open the gate into the next chapter. And I hope it’s bright and lovely and beautiful and filled with laughter.

And that’s what I am hoping for you too.

My Prayer For You:

When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion,
    we were like those who dream.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
    and our tongue with shouts of joy;
then they said among the nations,
    “The Lord has done great things for them.”
The Lord has done great things for us;
    we are glad.

Psalm 126:1-3