Writing my blog entry a lot earlier than usual today because I am getting the strong urge to take a nap, and I have foresworn afternoon napping, so I figure that by the time I am done writing this, I will either of gotten my second wind or I will be so truly tired that I will know that my urge to nap is based on actually needing sleep, and not just an urge to escape reality for a while.

It ain’t rocket science, but I am trying to be at least somewhat systematic about this whole thing. I have firmly etched the horror of skipping large portions of life into my mind and I definitely desire change. I want to live life, not dream it away.

But it will take time to learn to fill my days with activity and not to resort to taking naps all the damned time just because I have no idea what to do with myself and my time, and cannot handle the reality of filling my time with things other than fucking video games.

Speaking of dreams, though, I did have quite the doozy last night. Not sure what led up to this, but I was put into a situation where I was in some enormous building (possibly a hotel or a mansion of some sort… some place that was quite fancy and had a lot of rooms) and I somehow knew exactly what was about to happen : the police were about to have a violent and bloody confrontation with a dangerous criminal, and I had to bust ass to find someplace safe to wait it all out and not end up getting caught in the crossfire.

And when I say I knew exactly what was going to happen, I mean I knew every detail of what was coming. As I frantically searched for a safe place, I did so knowing that Room A would get riddled with bullets, and Room B was too exposed to the outside (snipers, I guess?), and so on.

So I ended up retreating into a suite where there would be three doors between me at the outside world, the door to the suite, the door to the bedroom of the suite, and the door to the bathroom for that bedroom. I holed up in the bathroom, and pushed things up against the door in case the criminal tried to batter his way in his desire to escape the police.

So yes, apparently I did not have faith in my prescience. Better safe than a statistic, I guess.

Then, it is a matter of cowering in terror while I heard yelling and screaming and crashing and gunfire from the outside. Noises that were getting louder and louder as the action came closer and closer. Eventually I could hear bullets hitting the wall between the bathroom I occupied and the bedroom it served, and I remember putting my hands over my ears and screaming that this is not how it was supposed to happen. Then there was a furious exchange of gunfire… and then silence.

And that is all I remember of the dream. I guess the cops got the guy. But more important than the plot of the dream was the emotional content. I was absolutely terrified, completely freaked out. I have never experienced immediate danger like that in my life, and so I got a taste of mortal fear during the dream. I was as scared as I can imagine being. All I wanted in life was for all this to be over so I could go back to living. I was scared beyond reason.

To be honest, I had always hoped I would handle a situation like that a little bit better. Retain at least a little sangfroid, enough so that I could make smart survival decisions and not just freak out like a rabbit on meth and just do whatever my fight or flight instincts tell me to do.

I mean, I am not expecting to be James Bond about it, but I had always hoped I would be able to keep my shit together in an emergency if I had to do so.

Then again, I did avoid death and the decisions I made were reasonably intelligent. I just made them while being freaked out to the extreme. So maybe I retained my intelligence despite being totally freaked out, which is not bad for someone who has never faced that sort of thing in real life at all.

In fact, maybe that is the best one can expect of someone who is not some battle-hardened warrior.

And I have to admit, while it was all a dream, it was pretty damned exciting. I sort of feel like I have been through something now, even though it was all the product of my subconscious mind. Some have theorized that this is part of the function of dreams (and daydreams) : to let us create simulated scenarios of things we feel we may encounter in real life, and “practice” them.

Not that I am predicting a big shoot up in my apartment building any time soon or anything. It need not be that literal. In fact, dreams seldom are. They speak in metaphor and psychomachea because they are attempting to express great emotional complexity and intensity while the parts of the brain that are literal and linear are asleep.

Not that I have a clue what my dream was trying to express. The fact that I somehow sort of knew what was going to happen intrigues me. That is what keeps this, in my mind, from being a simple fear dream, a “chased by monsters” dream for a jaded media-soaked gent like me.

The fear also intrigues me, though. Perhaps that was the real purpose of the dream, to stretch my emotional muscles now that I am letting more emotion through and to sort of put my emotional systems through their paces.

If so, bravo. I sure as hell was scared during the dream. That system checks out fine.

Now how about those erotic systems, hmmm?