“Even if she be not harmed, her heart may fail her in so much and so many horrors; and hereafter she may suffer--both in waking, from her nerves, and in sleep, from her dreams.”
― Bram Stoker, Dracula
I woke up this morning not being able to breathe. The air conditioner was icing the cold sweat that had covered my body and I could feel the discomfort with my blanket kicked away from my body. I struggled to wake up, I knew it was but a dream but I could not, after what seemed like prolonged torture, I could finally open my eyes and tears flew like a dam that has just been opened. The lump in my throat turned into a howl and I screamed till my throat was sore.
For people like me, trying our best to fit into a world of apparent psychiatric simplicity, fighting the demons in our minds and those in our dreams takes about the same amount of herculean effort.
Every day I try and try to act “normal” like Sisyphus dragging the boulder up the hill squeezing out the strength of every muscle in his body only to have it rolled down back to square one. My only hope is a dreamless drug-infused sleep that will give my body some respite before I wrestle the world again. But hopes are shattered quicker than a looking glass and when you’re dying while you’re living, even your dreams are against you.
“I still get nightmares. In fact, I get them so often I should be used to them by now. I'm not. No one ever really gets used to nightmares.”
― Mark Z. Danielewski, House of Leaves
But irrespective of your neurotypicality, I think the entire human race can agree that waking up startled in the morning because of an obnoxious nightmare makes us unanimously sick, especially when you need to get to work after that.
I am genuinely curious about how and if we can break the pattern, flip the switch, and stop the suffering. The moment you realize oh I am trapped in a dream, you could wriggle your way out of it. Of course, this is not applicable to those of us like Kafka’s Gregor Samsa who thought he was dreaming but quite evidently wasn’t.
“Nightmares exist outside of logic, and there's little fun to be had in explanations; they're antithetical to the poetry of fear.”
― Stephen King
And then there are people who think they saw a dream and think that the dream means something, some sort of foresight or indication like Lady Macbeth imagines, herself trying to wash the blood of Duncan from her hands in Shakespeare’s Macbeth.
I’m sure a lot of you have read Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and while I’m completely on board with the idea that dreams are a window to our unconscious self, I firmly believe that the interpretation of the unconscious mind is far more complex than we’d like to think.
We think our problems are the greatest, that our hardships are central only to us, and in some weird way it seems to comfort some people, it seems to make some people feel that they are special, but here’s the deal. If for a second you leave your privilege, status, cast, behind - you’ll notice that we all fall on our beds like an animal surrendering ourselves to the oblivion of sleep, unsure of what will flash in our minds as we hope to find the courage to begin another day.