There is something about dreams these days that almost makes it seem as if what we consider reality, is not the only one. Something cool about it, but also something eerie in the same sense.
My dreams used to be scattered all over the place: I’m up north with kids from kinder-garden class then all of a sudden I’m on a boat with my old friend and my uncle, two people who have never met. Some nights I could fly or at least float for a short period of time, in order to get me from place a to b. Other nights my legs were made of lead and I couldn’t move a muscle or make a sound due to my incredibly thick tongue. A lot of my dreams used to end in nightmares, a loved one dying or coming close to, or me losing my sense of self and finding myself in scummy corners of the world, dark spaces with miserable people.
I remember when I was younger there were a lot of nights that I was afraid to fall asleep because I didn’t want to be in that dark world I sometimes found myself in. As I tried to fall asleep, I used to lay there and try to train my brain to think happy thoughts. I pictured my happy place, being up north with my family, enjoying life’s little moments. I did this in hopes of bringing these happy thoughts into my dream world. It never worked.
These days my dreams are a lot different. Not in the sense that I am able to control them, (although I really do want to learn to lucid dream) but they are no longer made of things of fantasy. My dreams are now filled with events from real-life situations. Not necessarily do I dream of things that have already happened in my life, but instead my dreams consist of the people I spend the most time with and the places I spend the most time in and it all feels so real. Unlike when I was a child and I used to have a reoccurring dream of a huge blue monkey in the basement of our old home with bright yellow walls, who used to transform into a sumo wrestler and chase my sisters, friends and I around trying to murder us. Or the one I had at least once a week which consisted of a dark room and a TV and whenever the TV was turned on I wasn’t aloud to look away and it gave me this weird, uncomfortable, terrified feeling as I had to watch it. I don’t remember at all if there was anything specific on the TV, it was more the feeling it gave me as I watched it. It was like torture in my dream and I couldn’t wait to be aloud to turn the TV off. That dream was probably due to all the scary movies we weren’t aloud to watch as kids so we hid in the closet to defy our parents. It was a dark, it was a small crowded closet with nothing but a tv that played terrifying things for a kid at 8-12 years old. I wonder if dreams of this sort have anything to do with real life events or if they are just random.
Anyways, these days I spend most of my time in the restaurant I work at considering I am the kitchen manager and it is a very high-stress, busy restaurant. My boyfriend and I also picked up a side-gig of cleaning the restaurant floors and bathrooms in the morning in order to save up a little more cash. So, I start around 8:30 am, six days a week and don’t get out of there until 7/8pm most days. Some days I get to leave early at 5 or 6. Anyways, as the kitchen manager my job is to do all of the food ordering, There has been times (especially when I was new to this) that I have been off on par levels and we need more of a certain product than I expected so, we run out in the middle of service. Now that I have been doing it for a while I do usually order enough and if I don’t, I catch the mistake ahead of time and I am able to fix it before it’s too late.
Evidently the wait staff as well as my boss gets frustrated when we run out of product at all, let alone in the middle of service. I beat myself up so bad when I make these kind of mistakes because it’s embarrassing, plain and simple, I should do better. Me, as a person who is always worrying and stressing about how I could have done something wrong to make someone else’s life harder, I have been doing my best these days to make sure I do the orders properly. But I believe since I spend so much time thinking about messing up and stressing about work, it makes it’s way into my dreams.
I have had dreams or, lets call them nightmares, where I’ve forgot to order something important and all hell breaks lose or I’ve had dreams where I order something important that I know is needed and then the next day at some point when my subconscious mind brings forth this “memory” from my dream, I have a very hard time being able to decipher if it happened in real life or in the dream. And this goes for a lot of things. A conversation or confrontation I believed I had in real life only to find out I dreamt it. Or I’ll go grocery shopping in my dream and wake up looking for the bagels I swore I bought. I’ve spent some days searching for quite some time, driving myself crazy because in my head I am certain I bought it. When really it was just a dream.
Something else I was never able to do but now do frequently is fall back into the same dream once I’ve woken up. Once my physical body’s needs are met, I fall back asleep and go right back into the same world. Nothing significant happens inside of these dreams necessarily, I rarely even remember them after an hour or so of being awake. It just feels like another reality inside of my own. Not too long ago I remember tasting something in my dream, which was new for me. I remember waking up and remembering exactly what it taste like, it was rancid, although I don’t remember what it was, (which is why I want to start writing down my dreams while I do remember them) it all felt so real.
Dreams are fascinating me more and more these days and I truly hope to learn what they are all about. Not as if we will ever really know the answers until maybe when we’re gone, either way it’s cool to ponder. I feel like there is so much more than what we see in front of our eyes. I want to peel back the curtains, search through the layers, find more. I don’t want just the material things, can’t we find luxury of the mind? Ask questions, ponder? Who installed this low suffocating sky that surrounds us? Why are we limited to the physical realm when we all know there is something more, something greater than this, than us?
It is nice to see that more and more people are getting in touch with their spiritual sides these days. If we all continue to work on expanding our spiritual selves, maybe one day we will get closer to the answers we’ve all been searching for. What is the purpose of all this? Where do I fit in the grand scheme of things? And, what comes after this thing we call life?
If you are reading this and have any good recommendations on books/blogs/websites/podcasts that talk have informative information about dreams, or if you have a story of an interesting experience you’ve had with dreams, please comment below or email me at minddoesntstops@outlook.com
If you are interested in reading about a variety of different subjects such as mental health, inside the minds of disturbed artists, the importance of being an introvert, importance of body language and non-verbal communication, the importance of mental rehearsal and imagery, the power of our minds, mindfulness, metaphysics and the cosmic world and how all the great genius’ of the past have tapped into this power to achieve seeming miracles, addiction, abuse, the effects loneliness and so much more, please check out some of my other posts:
Fantastic piece