Nightmares, dreams and nighttime fairytales

I’m a weird-dream specialist. Honestly, I have weird dreams about three times a week. Usually it becomes evident right when I wake up that something is just wrong, I can wake up angry, I can wake up in love, I can wake up in tears. After half a minute, maybe a little more, that wears off and I realize that what felt so real just moments ago, was in fact just a dream. The other day I dreamt that my Mom told me to “stop being such a bitch all the time”. Just this morning I woke up thinking that I was best friends with a classmate, who I absolutely cannot stand. Once I woke up in the middle of the night, my cheeks and pillow wet from my tears because I thought my Dad had died. When I finally fell asleep again, I dreamt that my Mom passed away too, that morning I woke up as an orphan, so when I came downstairs I was so happy to see my parents sitting there.

I once visited a doctor, kind of an alternative doctor, because I had been ill-ish for 8 weeks and antibiotics did not help. I could tell she was quite the alternative doctor: she started to ask questions like ‘do you ever have weird dreams’, ‘do you sweat a lot’, ‘do you have itchy feet’? She then graded my personality silver. I tried convincing her that really my personality was GOLDEN, but no, that did not work out. The point is that ever since I visited that doctor, I just kept wondering about what those dreams had to do with my health. Or what dreams have to do with anything at all, since they hardly ever seem to make sense.

For quite some time I wrote my dreams down into a notebook that I kept on my nightstand. As soon as I woke up I would write everything I remembered about my dreams, thinking that maybe they would make more sense then. Recently I found that notebook, and I started reading. The strange thing was that from every dream, I could recall the exact feeling I had when waking up that morning. The best ones were the ones about traveling (and I can tell you it were a lot of them), when I woke up I felt like I had been away for 4 weeks, to Morocco, Egypt, Australia or the Dominican Republic and I would just feel so… Satisfied. Or content, or happy. Words cannot really describe the feeling that well. But I am pretty sure every single one of us has had those moments: when everything is just right.

Bottom line is: dreams may not have a function of themselves, but we can certainly give them one. Learn from the bad ones, and reminisce the good ones, to get that perfect feeling back when you need it.