Dreaming Is Serious Business
Aug. 22nd, 2013 10:44 amMirrored from Words, words, words, art..
Last night I had a nightmare.
This is nothing new or unusual for me. I’m a very active and vivid dreamer who routinely sees in color and can taste, smell, hear, feel, etc everything that’s happening. I can feel the change in texture of a painted iron fence, from smooth paint to rough rust spot. I can feel the dry heat of the sun on my head and back and the cool lapping of lake water on my legs, complete with the feel of rounded pebbles under my feet, toes digging in and gripping them. I once had a very pleasant dream where I was just sitting in a field of tall waving grass, dry and golden, rattling seed pods, while the sun set. The sky was brilliant colors, the air cooled, the stars slowly came out. It was peaceful.
But most of my dreams are pretty awful.
They’re complex, with convoluted plot lines. I have a lot of anxiety dreams about being lost, losing something, having to find someone or something. I’m never where I need to be. Sometimes I can read in dreams, and I have read the most amazing stories and histories. Other times words and letters are a shifting jumble and I need to read them and I can’t make sense of them. I frequently have dreams about needing to call someone and being unable to work the phone, tension and anxiety mounting as various things go wrong.
On top of that, I also have nightmares. Often. Frequently. Several times a week. Sometimes several times a night.
I’m chased through dark woods by slavering beasts who want to rip me apart. I’m traveling through ruined cities, looking for supplies and evading bad guys who want to kill me. I’m hiding someplace small and dark hiding from something lurking right outside, waiting, being absolutely silent. I’m on the run from people, from things, who want to torture and kill me. There are spiders on me. There’s something under my skin. My spouse/parent/child is possessed by a ghost/demon and nobody knows but me and I have to fix the problem before it kills me. Something or someone is trying to smother me and I can’t breathe.
I live with terror.
And that terror usually involves bodily harm- protracted bodily harm.
I mentioned that I can feel things? Cool water and round stones and breezes and grass? That I can feel the soft flutter of a cotton skirt against my bare legs, or the tickle of a dry leaf falling and brushing my cheek? I can feel pain, too.
I lie with chronic insomnia. I have a hard time falling asleep and I have a hard time staying asleep. If something (or someone) wakes me up, it can literally take hours for me to get back to sleep. I’m tired all the time, I enjoy lounging in bed, but I hate sleeping. I need to sleep, but I hate it. I wake up exhausted, often no more rested than when I lay down, and frequently more emotionally drained. I realized when I was in high school that I had a lot of delaying tactics around going to sleep and wondered if it was because of my dreams, and I think that’s true. There’s 6-10 hours a night where I’m not in control and horrors come out and play, and that is very stressful.
Sometimes I realize I’m dreaming, and I try to take control and direct things. Sometimes that works and I can change things or switch to a different dream. Once, while having an anxiety dream, I got very frustrated and exclaimed that this was JUST LIKE an anxiety dream and I was OUT OF HERE and I literally walked away and into a different dream. But other times I freak out and think “Oh, this is JUST LIKE a dream” but then lose that thread.
The first time I went on Wellbutrin I started seeing results very quickly. One result was that I got tired and went to sleep and woke up feeling refreshed. I stopped taking Wellbutrin for reasons I can’t remember, but took a generic form years later that sadly did not have the same effect.
I don’t know why my brain goes into overdrive while I sleep. It’s not related to physical activity or what I eat or if I’m depressed or what I’ve been watching or reading or anything. It just… bam.
Bam.
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