WHAT THE HELL, BRAIN?! WHAT THE ACTUAL HELL?!?
So I'm a big dreamer. I was always the kid who wanted to talk about my dreams, tried to draw them, had recurring characters and places in them. I've even inspired many of my stories off them, like most writers (I've had one story in my head since a dream about ghosts helping a girl in a hospital when I was 14).
This dreaming fascination has carried on into adulthood, and usually I'm quite fond of my dreams, writing them down as often as I can get my sleepy hands to find my dream journal.
But then, every once in a while, my brains decides to eff with me a little.
It's not often that I get nightmares. I'm mostly way to anxious in real life to carry that into my dreams; sleeping usually acts as a type of sanctuary from reality. But every now and again my paranoia distorts my dreams, turning them from me and a friend planting iceflowers in the sky to help the cloudmites breed, to me running for my life in a puddle of sand as a clawbeast tries to eat my face.THANKS brain!
Even these dream aren't often that scary. I can still see running, falling and other general fantasy nightmares as interesting or fun. The really bad dreams, for me at least, are the ones based in reality.
I remember one dream I had a few years ago where my Dad had died from lung cancer. The dream was waaaay to close to reality for my taste. My dad had been sick at the time from a different illness, the dream placed my normal friends and activities in the correct order, just added the horrible, unthinkable grief on top of it. The time in the dream was about a week, from the time he "died" to the funeral and a few days afterwards. When I awoke from the dream, I believed my dad had died, and that I was just going to try and get through the day like I had in my dream. It was unbearably horrible and depressing (enough that I'm kinda tearing up right now).
It wasn't until I realized that I had awoken in my bed at university, and not at home, that I realized it had been a dream. And it shook me up horribly. I had never had a nightmare so vivid and real before. For a good couple of days afterwards, I couldn't shake the feeling of depression and anxiety that followed the dream. No matter what happened in that time, it was skewed by the feeling that the dream had given me.I eventually got rid of the feeling and chalked the dream up to stress; it was my first year of university during midterms in a new province, and my dad was far away. I was just worried, homesick and fearful in general. I went on with my life and, as things got back to normal, eventually forgot the dream and the terror that accompanied it.
Until 5 nights ago.
After a night spent hanging out with friends watching sketch shows and chilling out, I went to bed in a good mood. It had been a stressful week with school and my week of silence going on, but now it was over! I could finally relax a bit.
Apparently, my brain disagrees.
My dream that night consisted of me screwing up something real bad. I don't even know what it was, but I broke one of my friends trust in a really horrible way. Everyone hated me and I was kicked out of my house by my room-mate. I couldn't contact my parents for some reason, so I went to a shrink, who told me what I did was pretty horrible, but there were ways to fix it. The most obvious way to do so was suicide. I was adverse to the idea, as one would hope, but the shrink in my dream convinced me that it was the only way to atone for what I had done. No one was going to like me ever again anyway, why spend the rest of your life being a wart on the earth exterior? I eventually saw his "sense" and decided to think his advice over. I walked around in my creepily accurate neighbourhood, stopping by a bridge. I looked down and decided to kill myself. I was just climbing over the edge when-
I woke up. Very quickly too, with surprising awareness. I sat there, think about killing myself, when I realized it had all just been a dream. My first response was relief that I hadn't done whatever it was I had done in my dream to my friend. But my second response was despair.
I has spent so much time in my dream convincing myself that I should kill myself that it carried on into real life. Just as I realized my father wasn't actually dead in the other dream, I realized that I didn't, and should never, kill myself. But the feeling was the same none the less. I felt completely worthless and despairing for the next four days, no matter what I did. It has finally faded today, but it still goes to show how much dreams and nightmares can effect you.
I love dreaming, but in times of stress and anxiety they can be the worst thing for you. It's amazing and terrifying what your brain can create for you when you have no conscious say over it. But you always have to remember that it's was just a dream. It sucks cuz they can be amazing and you want to live in them forever, but they can be worse than reality too.
In conclusion of this slightly depressing rant, nightmares SUCK! They can affect you in horrible ways and it bites balls! But they are NOT REALITY! They don't have to affect you if you don't want them too. It's something I need to learn how to do, but will hopefully come in time.
That's all for now (next week will be more cheery, promise). Till the next post, keep on smiling!
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