Andrea – You start by being in a situation where you are comforted by having others around you. But in exploring your inner world you feel you are alone, and that is uncomfortable for you – “I had gone a bit too far as well”.
The exploring yourself alone led you to feeling fear, unstable, and as if you were not on stable ground. You are trying to understand your inner world through your experience if the outer world of bodily experience. But the rules of one to not apply to the other – they are totally different. You cannot be hurt in your dreams. You cannot drown, you can’t die in a dream, no tiger or other animal can harm you. Of course you can feel feelings of dying, or being hurt, or drowning, but they are all images you create because you feel afraid and you haven’t faced up to your fears.
Most people feel certain their body is them, and are certain that their body is who they are. But dreams have a very different view of the body. They show again and again if anyone takes the time to record their dreams over a period of time that we all have a body, a soul and a spirit. The body is in constant change and will age and die. Dreams see it as like a car that we can use to get some necessary life experiences, but the driver can leave the car and the car does not define the driver.
Your fear and uncertainty led you to try to scramble back to the view most people have of life – being normal. But the normal life is awful, full of people killing each other, climbing over the weaker ones in their rush to get more money and power, experiencing enormous emotional pain and depending on alcohol, pain killers, anti-depressants and drugs to maintain their position. See
http://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/questions-2/#Summing But you did meet an important part of your inner world in the man who was also you. You did not in the end like what you saw. It is a way we try to avoid seeing who we really are. for in dreams we often create an outside person - a criminal, sexual pervert, a murderer, a down and out - who are all aspects of oneself. But these are usually not dominant parts of your nature - but even so we are all murderers because we kill or suppress parts of our self; we hold within us at the baby level a completely non moral self, for a baby has no moral judgement and is purely an instinctive being.
The past life can mean either a way of life you grew out of, or literally a life lived not by your present personality. Because your present self developed in a different body and with a different brain – but you are a recent outcrop from a very old plant/spirit. You can get more information from within you by using
http://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/acting-on-your-dream/#BeingPerson Tony