Steven LaChance Blog

Nightmares and dreams have always played a part in my life. If you have read any of my books, you already know that.

I have had recurring nightmares. The man in the shower in the basement of the house in Union stayed with me for a long time. He followed me into sleep. There was also a period when I dreamed about plane crashes before they happened. I would see them in detail.

One of them still stands out.

I dreamed of a news broadcast about a crash in the Florida Everglades. In the dream, they showed diagrams explaining how the plane rolled. It disturbed me enough that I told my mom about it the next morning. Days later she called and said, “Did you see the news?” It was exactly what I had described. Same location. Same explanation. Same rolling diagram.

Right before 9/11, I dreamed of planes crashing into buildings. After 9/11, those dreams stopped completely.

Strange. Unexplainable. But it happened.

I have also had visitations from family members and friends who have passed. My sister shows up sometimes when I need guidance. She offers advice. Sometimes she shares information that later turns out to be true.

So what are these dreams and nightmares?

The honest answer is simple.

We do not really know.

We do not fully understand the brain. It is incredibly complex. Science has pieces of the puzzle, but not the whole picture. Psychology gives us language for trauma, stress, memory, and how the nervous system stores experience. All of that matters.

But it does not explain everything.

There was a long stretch of my life where I kept trying to find the right box to explain things. I would grab onto a piece of science and build a house of understanding around it. For a while, it felt solid. Then it would not hold anymore. So I moved on to psychology. Then something else. I was trying to make it all fit neatly.

It never did.

Because some experiences do not live inside tidy frameworks. They do not show up with instructions. They come quietly, or they come all at once. They move through memory, through the body, through emotion. Sometimes they arrive in dreams. Sometimes in that strange knowing you cannot explain. You try to make sense of them the best you can, but they do not always cooperate. They sit somewhere between psychology and intuition, between science and something harder to name. And when we rush to label them, we usually miss the point. What matters most is not fitting them into a category. What matters is honoring that they happened.

It is not helpful to put everything in one box. Nothing about life or the paranormal works that way. I see so many people on shows, in movies, and in books trying to squeeze experience into one tight explanation. But boxes are loaded. They are jack-in-the-boxes that eventually burst open, exposing the cracks in logic and meaning.

Some dreams feel psychological. Some feel like coping. Some feel symbolic. And some do not feel like dreams at all.

Maybe it is biology. Maybe it is survival. Maybe it is something spiritual.

Probably it is all of the above.

I have done this quiet “knowing ahead” thing my whole life. I do not talk about it much because I do not know what it is. I understand science. I also understand the limits of science. Same with psychology. These things are hard to put into clean little categories, and we do ourselves a disservice when we try to force them there.

A friend of mine recently had a recurring nightmare return during a period of intense stress. That makes sense. When the world feels unsafe, the body responds. Nightmares are often how that response shows up.

That explanation is real.

But what if it is not the whole story?

What if sometimes these dreams are older than we are? What if they are echoes? Memory fragments? Something unresolved that rises to the surface when we are overwhelmed? What if, in some cases, they are not just reactions to the present, but reminders from somewhere deeper?

I do not pretend to know.

And that is the point.

Not everything needs to be solved. Some things just need to be witnessed.

What I do know is this: nightmares do not mean you are broken. They mean you are human. They mean your system is trying to process things it does not yet have language for.

Connection helps. Being grounded helps. Waking up and reminding yourself where you are helps. Holding someone’s hand helps.

Sometimes talking about it is enough.

We carry more than we realize. Dreams are one way it surfaces.

I will not tie this up in a box with a neat little bow. I will not tell you exactly what your nightmares mean. I will just say this.

Be gentle with yourself.

You are not weak for feeling things deeply. You are not strange for having dreams that do not make sense. You are not alone in any of it. We are all walking around with invisible weight, carrying more than we realize.

Nightmares are just one way it shows itself.