Olivia – I have had the heart beating strangely all my life, but only with slight pains.
Did you feel intense fear when it happened? If so it could explain the great pain, for in dreams we enter a different dimension where our beliefs or fear become real – like virtual reality – with a vengeance.
But you need to be checked out by your doctor to make sure.
There is another possibility though because everything was dark, showing that you had broken through the usual barriers we build between our waking body life and the other dimensions of our life. In effect you may have entered wider awareness. In fact as our body is paralysed when we dream we also lose all sensations arising from our body senses - our eyes, ears, taste, touch and smell. In that condition we are bodiless and exist in darkness, but to maintain our confidence, as people get terrified when they get near to realising that they are fundamentally bodiless consciousness, we create a dream image of ourselves with a body. Out of that arises all the fear of death. See
https://dreamhawk.com/dream-encyclopedia/dimensions-of-human-experience/ Because many people as their awareness reaches beyond what they feel is their normal self feel scared. Such resistances cause us to create awful dreams and fears as a means of avoiding our own inner world and its wonders. We feel that we will be swallowed up and we will die. It is important to say that when we meet the experience of powerlessness through becoming aware of the hugeness of your Life, which we are usually unaware if, it feels like something alien or attacking and it is a shock.
When we begin to meet the Hugeness that we are, we often react to it in our dreams or in waking with fear or panic. So we dream of being attacked by aliens or frightening creatures; or being swallowed by a whale or something huge, a tsunami, or even possessed by evil entities. If we realise that they are things we have created through our own fear we will pass on. But otherwise it will continue to haunt us as something that will get you; or you feel uncertain even lost in facing it! But it is only our small self image, our ego that reacts because it feels powerless, even though in reality the Hugeness is part of our totality. It is the enormous potential you have within you, it maybe Life you are frightened of or have been ignoring. It often frightens us. We fear that our ego or personality as it is, will be lost, destroyed or overcome by the Hugeness. My experience is that nothing is ever lost, instead we are added to. See
https://dreamhawk.com/approaches-to-being/opening-to-life/ Tony