Dreams suck. Not the kind where you "have a dream" - as in "I have a dream of someday fitting back into that skirt that lives in the back of my closet." I'm talking about the dreams that are little movies of your hopes and fears that play in your head when you're asleep and unable to hit the stop and eject buttons.
I hear that some people don't dream. More accurately, they probably just don't remember their dreams. I think if you don't dream, you go crazy or Freddie Krueger comes or something. We all dream.
But some people are blessed not to have vivid enough dreams that the dreams wake them in the night in a shaking sweat or they wake up in the morning with the emotions tied to a nightmare still coursing through their consciousness. I am not one of these blessed people.
I have very real dreams. They're in color with sound and real people, and I experience them as if they are really happening. That's fine if it's something good, but I have the unfortunate tendency of having nightmares. This often leads to me waking up in the night or in the morning feeling like I'd feel if the nightmare had been real.
I once dreamed that I had suddenly become aware that I'd killed a homeless man when I was 18 - I'd suppressed the memory and then suddenly, in my 30s, the truth had come out, and I remembered what I had done, and now I was faced not only with the psychological trauma of what I'd done, but I faced going to prison for it. I woke in an absolute terror, and it literally took me about 20 minutes to figure out if I HAD killed someone when I was 18 and had repressed it. It was awful.
More often than not, the dreams aren't about truly tragic things like that, though. They're more about things you're afraid of happening or they're some weird representation of stress or fear. You dream that you miss a flight you have the next day, or you realize you're still in college and haven't gone to a particular class for 2 months and now the final is today, or the ever-popular boyfriend is cheating or you see your ex-boyfriend somewhere and he's not only with some new woman but he's really mean to you. Those are fun.
If you are one of those people who doesn't remember their dreams, count yourself lucky. For us creative types, it's a double-edged sword. It's great to have the one where everyone likes you, but the ones where someone in your family is gravely injured or killed are so not worth the popularity ones. And Ex-Boyfriend, please don't be mean to me when I next talk to you. Your new girlfriend in my dream last night was named Paula. I've never liked that name.
2 comments:
Crap. Was it Paula because I asked you if you remembered Paula from elementary school (by the way, her name was Paula Harris - I just remembered it)?
You have got to turn CSI off, girl. Cut the cord.
Okay, so a bit of a delayed comment. But really, I'm right there with you. I think we've talked about this dream thing before. I have crazy nightmare dreams. Dreams where my family members or friends are dying, and dreams where my pets are burning in a fire, and of course the nasty boyfriend-cheating dream. That's a no-brainer.
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