My dreams are weird.
The mere thought of being in a story where anything could literally happen is both terrifying and fascinating at the same time.
To give a full context on why this is happening, the first thing you need to know about this is that it has been ongoing regularly and I’m quite sure that I’ve just accepted it as the new normal of my every day.
The second is that it’s an induced state, a side-effect, after drinking heavy doses of medication needed to control my rather stigmatized illness (that I am not ready yet to say on public).
Lastly, it happens during and on when I have full-time, heavy sleep (duh!), one where I’m comfortable enough to enjoy at least eight hours of rest without having to wake up all feeling dizzy.
My dreams had been strange ever since I was a kid, and this was before I was on full-blown daily medication. I could barely remember them now, as all dreams of the past should be, but I still reminisce about them from time to time. The hint of nostalgia doesn’t hit me like a truck, but like relaxing on a slow current of water coming down a cold stream it lingers in the back of my mind. They’re all vague, mind you, but they just decided to frick it and stay all rent-free.
I once dreamt that I and my childhood crush were being chased by ravenous zombies out to get our flesh. And once dreamt of a very romantic date with a person I don’t even recognize, a faceless one at that. And once dreamt of being slowly ripped out from the depths of the waves of the rampaging ocean as I ascend to a blind-causing light. There are nights when I don’t have a dream at all; just sheer darkness like the pits of an underwater abyss.
I am not afraid of falling asleep at night and wondering if I’ll have nightmares next, as it may be implied due to my seemingly one heck of a dream sequence torture. I regularly fall asleep rather easily, especially when the temperature’s just right and my bed feels extra soft and comfy. And if I have trouble falling asleep, despite the constant twisting and turning or mini-existential crisis, I listen to music. Classical takes the cake: Debussy, Tchaikovsky, Mozart, Beethoven, etc. But regular, modern music is just alright as well.
I do find it intriguing sometimes that the music I hear, during asleep, can be heard during my dreams. Imagine having loud music blasted in an open arena empty of people but you. The condescending sounds often either distort or enhance the experiences I have during the peak of my REM cycles. What I do find troubling on rare occasions is that it sometimes disrupts my sleep, waking me up somewhere in the middle of the night. The best thing I could do to solve that issue is to quickly remove my attached headphones and fall back to sleep. Even music cannot beat my unintended drowsiness at most times.
But to dream or not to dream in the middle of the night, regardless of whether I’m in a state of hyper music-inclined support or not, is not a choice of mine to make. And I like it that way. The unexpectedness of what’s going to show up in one’s deep sleep is both beautiful and horrifying at the same time. Not being masochistic and all, and not kink-shaming either. It’s just that I just learned to live with it.
To make matters better, I often remember my dreams for a very long time. Not the whole dream itself, but just important fragments. This integral information is highly needed for my skills in writing and building fictional stories. In fact, a majority of my pieces are conceptualized because of the weird dreams I have. They’re mostly horror, but I can diversify to any genre when I want to.
For example, last night, I once dreamt of a novel-like scenario where common story tropes are reversed. It is about a male protagonist who kept on searching for ways to make money, only to be referred by a friend to a special job. That special job is to be a pretend husband of a female protagonist, who’s also a rich daughter of a prominent business mogul in the country. I may have to write the whole thing one day into a full-fledged, serialized web novel once every concept and idea is there and polished. But for now, I’ll just leave it here for reasons.
Dreams often mean something, especially when you search the internet. That’s the pinnacle of one’s curiosity whenever they have a dream and they just can’t seem to put a thought in it. But what about dreams where it’s nearly impossible for the dreamer to describe? Who knows, maybe someday someone will invent a revolutionized technology where dreams are projected into screens. Or even better, projected like holograms in the air.
Being an adult-in-progress (and an adult in general) means that our capabilities for imagination often hinder us from concocting creative outputs of fun and delight. Imagine a Cartesian plane: imagination on the NEGATIVE y-axis and age in the POSITIVE x-axis, and a line going from top to bottom in a parabolic manner. Our power of imagination is inversely proportional to our age, which means we tend to become bleak and tend to have a hard time imagining creative things as we grow older.
I think dreams are often placeholders for the imaginations we can’t let out. It’s like, we have in our heads these tiny, little Pandora-like boxes where imagination and stored. And that box only conveniently opens whenever we fall asleep. I may not explain it scientifically, or a factual one at that, but that’s something I want to believe.
I think, that even if we tend to have our imagination stripped away from us as we grow older, we often don’t realize that it’s just locked up in our heads. It’s just there somewhere, waiting for you - the key - to have to open that container.
This is Random Raver, a newsletter about anything that has got to do with random dreams, thoughts, and ramblings.