Crazy Dreams

So I started my new medication Monday night, and while it doesn't necessarily make me feel anything that it says it might (like dizzyness, drowsiness, or nausea), I think it may be the culprit behind a very active dream life.

My primary care physician (I have two - this one I haven't seen in like 2 months) asked me about my dreaming habits the last time I saw him, and I told him that lately I haven't been dreaming. His response was that everyone dreams every night, but if those dreams occur in REM sleep, you won't have any remembrance of them upon waking, almost as if they never happened. I don't know anything about the psychology of sleep, so I don't know if this is 100% true, but I'm more inclined to believe him than I am any other random person off the street.

I continued with this cycle of dreamlessness until Monday night. My dreams Monday were fairly average - just boring event dreams. I have a lot of these. They are usually about conversations with people or just time spent with people. When I wake, I have very vivid memories of the looks on their faces, the emotions they expressed, and the exact words they spoke.

When I'm not having these boring dreams, I'm usually digging into my small collection of recurring nightmares. I've had many in the past about being at the beach or at a beach house, weird things happening, and suddenly, waves start coming in. I retreat towards some sort of shelter, but they get bigger and bigger until we're dealing with an inescapable tsunami ordeal. Obviously, I wake before I meet my demise.

The rest of my recurring nightmares are all sort of common. The settings are different (although always luxurious), but they all have the same problem and the same feeling.

The one I had last night was one where I'm living in a mansion with my mother. Some of the rooms in the mansion (usually just the kitchen and the dining room) are the same as in our actual house. But the rest of this mansion is larger than any I've ever seen. It has ornate blue, red and gold carpets, grand staircases, beautiful victorian furniture, old lamps and chandeliers with old lightbulbs, a crappy old TV from the 70s (no idea), balconies, etc. On one wing of the house (if you were standing in front of it looking at it, it'd be on your right), is my bedroom - small, in girly colors with a more modern feel, and with only one tiny lamp so it's quite dark. The right wing of the house extends quite far (in symmetry with the left wing), but I never see anything else in it, only my bedroom.

I always leave my bedroom in these dreams to find my mother standing in the hallway across the big rotunda type room in between the two wings, where her huge bedroom and a library, among other rooms, are. She's always wearing clothes like she'd wear to go to work and telling me she has to leave in ten minutes or so. I acknowledge her and she tells me to behave, be careful, dinner's in the fridge, etc., as moms do. Off of this "rotunda" space, towards the front of the house is a large wall of glass looking out over the property in front (a huge garden) and a set of 20 or so stairs about 15 feet wide-ish leading down to a living area where the 70s TV and a pretty red velvet couch are hiding around the corner. When my mother leaves, I always settle into the room on this little couch. There's usually a black and white movie on TV, and occasionally I'm happily chatting away on the laptop.

And then it starts. There's this feeling. It feels like there's something there that I can't possibly escape from, that it's getting closer, and that it can see me but I can't see it. It's not so much a person or a ghost but some sort of force (I visualize it as a big, black, cloudy blob). I always stand up from where I'm sitting and look around as if I'll see it peeking out from my mother's room or the dark hallway near my bedroom, but I never see this thing. I usually rush around and try to gather some important things, like my cell phone or a coat or my keys. While doing this, I always try to contact someone. It's always one of two people, people that I trust and feel very safe with in real life, and I usually reach them on the phone long enough for them to tell me to just be calm and that it's probably nothing, but that if I feel that I need to, I should leave. At this point the feeling of this thing exponentially increases - it's much closer and I can almost see it or feel it near me. And then I wake up.

Every single time it happens like this with only minor changes. Sometimes I don't have the whole dream, only part of it. Sometimes it's in a swanky hotel or a museum. But in the end, I always feel like there's no way I can escape, like I'm trapped there with this thing.

This dream always leaves me a little rattled, even though it's not particular terrifying. It just gives me a very strange feeling. I'm sure I could psychologically relate it back to my feelings about the house I grew up in, of which I am now the sole inhabitant. I've always had strange feelings in that house as well that make me very uneasy. When my brother passed away, that feeling was intensified, and I often find myself looking over my shoulder when I'm moving about the house.

I never know what to think about all of this. Am I one of those "crazy people" who believes in ghosts and spirits and all of that stuff? Yes. I am. Do I believe that all ghosts/spirits are out to harm people or have the capacity to harm people? No. But I do think that there are surely some "entities" out there that possess the manifestation of energy to do so.

So there you have it. I believe in crazy things. And have crazy dreams. Maybe they mean nothing, or maybe they mean something kind of important. I really have no idea, but I find it all very interesting and want to get in the habit of journaling and analyzing my dreams to maybe learn a little bit about them or myself or something. I'm sure if something really interesting comes up in the future, I'll share it.