It has been an age-old debate as to what exactly dreams are. Many questions have arisen on the topic, and dreams are filled with so much speculative history that it has become a concept of wondrous intrigue.
Throughout documented time dreams have been revered, feared, judged, and interpreted. Entire careers have been created for the purpose of understanding dreams, and entire lives have been spent driven toward answering the question: what are dreams and how can they help us?
While I have a lot of theories that I would like to impart, this work isn’t meant to be instructional, insightful, or really answer any questions; future articles which I am soon to write will cover a lot of this, my speculative theorizing.
For now, I’d like to share how dreams helped me find my path and explain why dreams have been such a strong holding on me and have created such an impact on my entire life.
It’s common to hear about the child who has a bad dream and finds themselves climbing into bed with “Mom” to feel protected and fall back asleep.
For me, my dreams were always an exciting adventure, regardless of the nature of them.
I never felt like I was in danger because of what I witnessed or experienced in a dream state. That is, when I was a child. A few years ago, though, that all changed, and I began to fear to dream in its entirety.
I’ve always taken pride in my propensity for observation and analysis, all the way back to high school where I would generate circumstances using my actions or statements (lies, usually) to create a specific scenario in which I could learn from people’s reactions.
The relevance here is that my observational skills seemed to take on a life of their own and display themselves, with frightening accuracy, in my dreams. Every night I would dream about people I knew having conversations, in which I would be one of the conversationalists, and would experience emotions relating to what I had subconsciously deemed most likely they were thinking.
A lot of my colleagues, and even myself at the time, were quite convinced that I had suddenly become psychic, with the best example being when I predicted the death of someone’s wife before he told us.
I would witness these conversations as though they had actually taken place and went out of my way to prove the scenario I witnessed was at least close to accurate.
Over the course of many months, I started learning things about people that I didn’t want to know – what they didn’t like about me, what they felt about other people around us, how they were wrongly handling certain situations, and eventually, that my fiancé at the time was cheating on me.
Needless to say, before the ladder occurrence, I had started to become an incredibly paranoid person and started pushing people away; what would you expect, seeing that nobody likes anybody and all people do is complain about one another.
After sitting down with my ex and describing what I witnessed in my dream, and even telling her the other man’s name, she admitted that she had been only staying at my house until she found a way to get along on her own and that it had been going on for a few years.
Obviously, this was a turning point in my life from which the rest of my time here would branch out of, and at the time, felt like I had wasted the better part of a decade. I couldn’t get it out of my head that I never would have found out if I hadn’t become “psychic” and never had that dream.
I couldn’t get it out of my head that dreams suck, and I never want to have another one.
At this point, I stopped dreaming altogether, because I stopped sleeping.
Over the course of approximately 7 months, I had noticed my capacity for memory and in-depth thought waning drastically. I began to feel malnourished and always tired. I started “sleeping” over 10 hours a night and never felt any better, and never had any dreams.
So, I started seeing sleep specialists, doctors, and psychologists. The doctor told me that I was becoming very ill very quickly and my body was losing the ability to maintain “automatic processes” like digestive system function and stable heart rhythm.
The sleep specialist told me that I wasn’t reaching REM while I slept, and never actually entered the recuperative sleep state which our bodies require.
The psychologist told me it was because I convinced myself to never dream again.
I spent about 6 months trying various therapeutic remedies, homeopathic and otherwise, with nothing working. Eventually, I started only sleeping for 2-3 hours a night, which my salary job loved, and got a lot of remodeling done in my house. I also had extra time to socialize and meet a few new people.
Finally, I met an unnamed person who essentially told me that I’m too valuable of a person, work too hard to help everyone around me, and am not allowed to be sick or die. Something about this particular person just snapped me out of it, and I went back to a mostly normal sleep schedule.
That was in October of 2014, so it’s been almost an entire year since my fear of dreams almost cost me my life. Since then, my “psychic” dreams haven’t stopped, but I’ve learned to pay much less credence to their validity.
I’ve also continued having more normal dreams that are less invasive in other people’s lives and have found my old love for the adventure in these dreams. Dreams have always been important to me, and I believe them to be very important to every person for many reasons, which I will discuss in future articles.
Now that you all understand the level of influence dreams have had on my life, I hope my writings in the future will be less ambiguous in nature.
