Chapter Twenty-Five: Dreams/Nightmares


5/24/17


     Do you ever wake up from a dream and wonder "What the hell was that?!" It happens to me all the time. The dreams I do remember are always followed by a sense of confusion. Sometimes I wake up sweating, disoriented, sometimes I wake up happy and smiling, or angry. My most memorable dream is one where I am running through this field full of beautiful flowers, it's a nice, warm sunny day, and I am running through these flowers, without a care in the world. Then I hear something chasing me, and I turn around and it's my mother with a knife. I've had this dream since I was a little girl, for as long as I can remember. Every time I have it, the knife my mother is holding gets a little bit bigger. I'm not even going to try and imagine what this dream might mean. Some people try to interpret your dreams, but I don't know if all of them actually mean something. Maybe it's just because I had Chinese food for dinner, who knows? Maybe it's because I'm crazy. Either way, these dreams happen for a reason. Just recently, I had this one weird dream where my friends and I were all involved in a riot, and we all got arrested together. We ended up in the same jail cell all together, maybe about 6 or 7 of us, and some of my friends didn't even know each other very well, because the only way they met was through me. Anyways, we got let out one day but we had to come back at the end of the day (yes I am aware they don't do this in actual jail) and some of us went our separate ways, but me and three of my other friends came back to my house just to shower and eat and stuff. Two of my friends didn't want the other friend to come back with us, because they had apparently just seen her shoot up heroin back in jail, but they told her it was because there "wasn't enough room to sit" for her to come to my house. So she had to walk to her house, which was down the street. Then I told them just because she had shot up heroin didn't mean we should shut her out. She looked really sad and I felt bad, but I still let her go. This was a friend I actually haven't seen in years, but I don't think she would ever actually shoot up heroin, so this dream didn't really make sense to me. I woke up wondering what in the world just happened and why I would ever have a dream like that.  would never be involved in a riot, but I guess if I was going to be arrested for something it would probably be something like that.

     I asked my Facebook friends to tell me about some of their most memorable dreams or nightmares. I got some pretty interesting answers. The first person who answered had two different weird dreams to tell me about. She said when she was pregnant with her first child, she had a dream that she was giving birth to a sloth. I bet that would be the longest labor and delivery in the history of labor and delivery. Then she said she had another dream that she was in a wheat field, wading through mud, weighed down and it was hard to walk. Something was chasing after her, but instead of focusing on escaping, she was fixing her makeup in a compact mirror, not a care in the world. I think that was the funniest one I heard. Then my other friend said she had a recurring dream where she had a plastic slide/ playset type thing in her backyard and she was standing on it, but there were monsters standing underneath it, shaking it like an earthquake. They shook it so much that she started losing her balance and falling over on it, but she could count to three and yell "WAKE UP!" in the dream and she could wake herself up that way. I thought it was really weird that she could tell herself to wake up.

     Someone else said she had a dream a few weeks ago where she was driving over a huge bridge thousands of feet above the ground and her steering wheel suddenly locked up, and her car went flying over the guardrail. That is a really bad nightmare if you ask me, I think I might pee myself if I woke up from that (I'm only half kidding). Another friend said that she had a recurring dream that she would get out of bed, and everything around her was huge, like she had shrunk. Then she would climb up on top of the dresser and jump off but never hit the ground, just keep falling and falling forever. I said that reminded me of some kind of Alice in Wonderland type thing. Someone else said when she was younger she used to test this dream she had, it always happened when she slept without a pillow, which I thought was freaky. It was in black and white, and she would be standing ankle deep in the ocean, with a creepy cartoon-like monster chasing her, but there would be no shore. She did say it never got her though, which is good. Someone else said she'd be sleeping in the pitch black and hear lots of people talking loudly, and it would get louder and louder, and then a faint tapping noise would start along with it and both noises would get louder still. Then when she didn't think it could get any louder, she would wake up.

     Another friend said she has a recurring dream where she's sleeping in her room and it's really dark, and then she notices a shadowy man sitting in the corner of the room watching her sleep. She wakes up in the dream, asks the man who he is and why he's watching her, and he would say "I'm the devil." And then she wakes up in real life. She said she's moved 6 times since she's been having this dream and it's always the same thing happening but the room is always the room she's currently living in. One person said she had a dream when she was pregnant that she was breastfeeding her baby, and she looked down at the baby and it turned into a kitten, and the kitten jumps up and starts running away. The same person said she had a dream about a friend who had died, and she was talking to him in his attic and asked him why he left, and every time he responded there was a loud noise that blocked her from hearing his answer. Then he died right in front of her and she saw him the way they had actually found him in real life, on the couch in the living room. That one kind of scared me, because it sounds so real and so sad, it's definitely a nightmare. I would be terrified if that happened to me. The last person said he had a recurring nightmare where he would be arguing with someone, a different person every time, and then he would jump in front of a train but then wake up immediately. 

     These dreams all sounded pretty freaky to me. It was amazing to hear all these crazy things the mind can do to you in your REM stage of sleep. Dreams can last a few seconds, or they can last 20-30 minutes. It all depends on many different things. There are several reasons and circumstances that make dreams or nightmares happen. Drugs, alcohol, pregnancy, children, your job, death, sickness, these can all affect your dreams or make you dream differently. Love, sex, depression, pain, relationships are other things that can affect them. As for the interpretation of dreams, you never know what a dream might mean. Some people believe in the whole thing. Like if you die in your dream you'll die in real life. I don't see it that way. And dreams are called dreams for just that reason. It's a place for your fantasies or your worst fears to play out. But I have a feeling that it's a blessing in disguise that we can't remember most of them...

xx

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