Holy crap, this super intense dreaming shit is getting hardcore.

I just spent another day mostly asleep and the dream level was maxed the whole damn time.

It really feels like I just came back from somewhere far far away. Or worse, that I just went to sleep in one life and woke up in another, and I am not totally sure which one is real.

In popular culture, we have a lot of wonderful things to say about dreams. Follows your dreams, don’t be afraid to dream, a dream is a wish your heart makes…

Well my dreams scare the shit out of me. So forgive me if I do not feel the same.

And it is not like they are nightmares. Usually they are quite pleasant, in a neutral sort of way. So no big orgies or hot sexual encounters or wild wish fulfillment trips where I am rich and powerful and a superhero or anything.

Honestly, most of them seem somewhat like I am living another person’s life. Perhaps that is one of the things that frightens me. It feels so much like I am someone totally different in these dreams that I feel like my dreams make me unsure of who I really am.

And the other lives seems so real at the time, although when I wake up and think about what happened, there are always a lot of things that are pretty weird about the dream world that you would thing would tip me off at the time that I was dreaming.

But that is that lucid dreaming stuff, and I can barely manage lucid waking.

But the usual themes are always there. Constant motion is one of them, generally in the form of searching for something, like, for instance, the way back home. I have a lot of dreams, as I have mentioned before, where I get lost and as I try to get back to where I was, I just get more and more lost, usually with things getting “curiouser and curiouser” as I go along.

But without the cute dresses or charmingly whimsical animals. Dammit.

It is usually not very scary, being lost like that. I am usually quite confident that I will find my way back sooner or later, and meanwhile, I suspect that I am kind of enjoying the challenge, and the sidelines that I encounter.

Sometimes, though, there is no being lost aspect at all. That is happening a lot more lately. Sometimes, I am just slightly adrift in somebody else’s life, usually a quiet pleasant one with plenty of people they are close to in their lives. I consider this progress. I think my mind is trying to dream up the things I have missed out on in my life, like all the personal connections that people usually get through their families, their friends, their jobs, and their romantic relationships.

I see this as part of my mind’s attempt to heal itself, and I applaud it.

In fact, I am beginning to wonder if I have been “blaming” the wrong factors for these bouts of heavy dreaming. I have blamed caffeine, weird weather, sleep apnea, and sinus malfunction, and probably a lot more things besides.

But maybe it is all much simpler than that. Maybe I have these days upon days of dreaming simply because my therapy is causing a lot of deep emotions to rise to the surface and be processed again, and my brain simply needs to do a hell of a lot of dreaming, and hence a hell of lot of time sleeping, in order to deal with all the changes going on in there.

I suppose that means that if I spent more time consciously thinking about and dealing with these things while I was awake, I would have more peaceful and less disturbing sleep.

But I am way too lazy and self-indulgent to do something while awake that will happen automatically in my sleep without me having to lift a metaphysical finger.

That might cut in to my valuable wasting my life on video games and Internet chat time!

So on the plus side, while I would rather be awake, I am glad that things are getting done while I am sleep, even if waking up from all that dreaming can be dreadfully disorienting and downright scary when I can’t even remember who I am, where I am, what day or year it is, or whether or not any of this is real at all.

Perhaps part of me just does not want to come back. Certainly I want to escape the life I lead right now (no offense to the people in it) and in my dreams, I do just that. I get to be someone else, someone who increasingly has it better than I do, even if they are just as poor. Someone who has close connections with lots of people, someone who has a close knit family, and most importantly, someone who has that sense of security that I have longed for my entire life without even realizing it.

A long time ago, I was emotionally abandoned by my family, and withdrew into myself as a result. And for a long long time, the very concept of being able to feel secure in the warmth of relationships with others was so far from my mind that it might as well have been written in an alien language deep under the surface of Mars.

As a result, I think I was more distant with people than I realized. You can pay a hell of price for being a nonjoiner. I did not trust the world enough to risk committing to connection with others. I have always gone very slowly and cautiously in my relationships, such as they were, and not a lot of people have the sort of perception and patience needed to wait around for someone to finish coming out of their shell for them.

And I need to work on that.

Thanks dreams! Keep up the good work.