Dreams Are Slept On

I feel like we don’t talk about dreams enough.

There are definitely reasons why. For one, most of us probably forget our dreams after waking up. You can’t speak of something you can’t remember. Secondly, dreams often pale in comparison to the real world. After all, why would you care about the dream where a breakdancing chinchilla whipped out a Glock and Swiss-cheesed you in Gotham City when you have bills to pay in the real world? These are genuine and understandable reasons.

But there will probably never be a time in human history when we can experience omnipotence like we do in dreams. You can give yourself superpowers and fly around like Superman or become a Jedi like Luke Skywalker. You can create entire worlds or explore an intergalactic space casino and gamble all your money away. We possess the ultimate form of escapism, and it’s barely spoken of.

However, though omnipotence is wild, it’s quite superficial. There’s something much weirder about dreams.

Excluding grief, the most extraordinary feeling I can think of while awake is nostalgia. It’s so intense and esoteric, and extremely unlike any other emotion or feeling. Now, I haven’t tried drugs, but I’d one-hundred-percent believe that nostalgia genuinely feels like one. Whenever I experience nostalgia, life suddenly feels so beautifully alien and truly foreign. Why? Obviously, because the past is literally foreign. But I’d also probably guess that it’s because most of our lives will be spent cycling through the same basic emotions over and over. You’ll get your average dose of happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. But nothing comes close to the level of abstraction of something like nostalgia. The basic emotions may be heavily intensified. Say, if you’re about to die, you’ll definitely feel the worst fear of your life. But do they evoke the sense of feeling alien and foreign? I haven’t died yet, but I’m guessing the last thing that will be on my mind is feeling wonderfully strange.

Emotions and feelings become extraordinarily perplexing in dreams. How could they not? You’re forced to react to new situations you’ll probably never encounter in your life. When I’ve had nightmares of floating in space and seeing Earth be destroyed in the most gruesome and horrifying way by a cosmic event, I’ve felt existential dread different from the dread felt while awake. However, the “dream dread” wasn’t necessarily worse than anything I’ve experienced while awake. It just felt different and foreign. I mean, seeing the Earth ripped apart would put the fear of God in anyone, but it was just strange. And to think that I wasn’t lucid in this nightmare, so I genuinely believed that the Earth was destroyed. That’s another thing about dreams: if you’re not lucid, you’re likely going to think they’re real.

Now imagine having a nightmare about your loved ones dying and thinking it’s real. Chances are, you have, but there’s an even greater chance that you forgot how it felt. I’ll remind you that it’s among the worst conceivable pains. Now, I know I was just talking about abstract alien emotions, but dreams and nightmares are still fascinating in that they can intensely amplify any of the basic emotions. So, let’s talk about abstract emotions later. The last time I had a nightmare about receiving a call that my mother had tragically died, all I remember is that the sadness, grief, and anger were all amplified to a mind-breaking and very potent amount beyond anything I’ve experienced in life. In this nightmare, my mom died, and because I wasn’t lucid, I thought it was real. You can probably imagine how that felt, but I didn’t know it would feel so extreme. And now I know. And now I’m biting my nails, wondering: if it felt that extreme in a nightmare, imagine how extreme it’ll feel in real life.

This is what I find fascinating about this nightmare: it unlocked something I haven’t even felt in my life yet. Hopefully, I never feel the pain, and maybe I will die before my mom. Nonetheless, dreams and nightmares teach you things and reveal new information. The second thing I find fascinating is that dreams and nightmares, as aforementioned, intensify emotions and feelings by orders of magnitude. As I said, they can combine grief, sadness, and anger into a hellish pain. They can scale ordinary happiness to a truly euphoric high. They can turn fear into an otherworldly dread.

It really feels like I’m stating the obvious, and I am. But sometimes you gotta state the obvious because knowing is not understanding. It’s just like how some people know climate change is bad but don’t understand the severity of it.

There’s one particular dream/nightmare that really exemplifies the word esoteric. It’s so hard to explain and communicate what it feels like. I believe it’s called a geometric nightmare, and it’s a blend between a dream and a nightmare, or a dreamscape. Essentially, every few years, I have this weird dreamscape about circles feeling infinitely dense, and the feeling manifests in my fingertips. On top of that, another feeling spreads to my glasses, which I don’t even wear while sleeping, where the glasses feel like a one-dimensional line that is at risk of being snapped by the circles. And it’s a nightmare in that it feels disgusting and existentially frightening, and it has actually made me break out in a cold sweat from what I’ve remembered. It’s so triggering that it manifests as real-world symptoms. Now, hopefully, that isn’t a sign of a rare disease or something. I’m pretty sure it’s not. I just think the dreamscape was that abstract and weird and strange. Again, the existential dread wasn’t worse than, say, the fear of death while awake. It also wasn’t worse than the existential dread of watching Earth be destroyed. But it was also completely different from those two types of dread. See, this is where it gets weird. How are there this many types of existential dread? Anyway, in simple terms, the circles were scaring me. I’m guessing they simulated what standing next to a black hole would feel like, though that doesn’t fully explain it. It was just strange. I don’t even think I explained it correctly.

The fact that I’ll probably never be able to explain this dreamscape supports my claim that dreams are stranger than you might think. I think I have a higher probability of creating a car transmission from scratch than ever coming close to explaining the dreamscape.