Waking life:

If there ever is a time that I don’t feel like writing, it’s usually after a nightmare. I apologize for stepping away from the keyboard recently, but I haven’t been able to wrap my head around a series of disturbing, confusing and down right horrifying dreams. It’s only natural that since I dream every night, they won’t all be about rainbows, lollipops and butterflies. But when the inevitable happens, I just can’t bring myself to write it down in detail. Each dream is a unique experience that often feels very real, and can affect me emotionally more than some waking life events. I choose not to relive those moments much like we all try to forget certain events in the past.

My intentions usually are to ignore the messages and mentally delete them as quickly as possible; however, sometimes the dreams poke and prod at my memory – refusing to be shoved aside like yesterday’s leftovers.

The question always is, how should I deal with nightmares?

It’s hard to know sometimes if one night’s sleep is just a random fleeting moment, or if there really is a meaning to it all. I’d love to tell you that I have a scientific formula for dealing with this stuff, but that would be a blatant lie. Usually, I just try to move on with my life and if anything unusual happens, I can look back and make the connection. Unfortunately, this doesn’t always work out well. In the case of one dream, my tendency to ignore potentially psychic messages was exercised at a loved one’s expense.

In that dream, someone special and particularly close to me was extremely distraught, crying in anguish over an illness and the pressing thought of dying. It broke my heart to the very core to see her this way. After waking, I immediately called to check-in and make sure she was ok. To my surprise, she did not seem upset at all, rather she told me that everything was fine. I believed her and decided that the dream was meaningless. It wasn’t until a month later that she revealed to me that she had been severely depressed and actually couldn’t stop crying for weeks. This prompted her doctor to prescribe some much-needed medication.

It occurred to me that what I witnessed while asleep was in fact happening in waking life, and whether she wanted to tell me about it or not, I still found out. If I had listened to the message in the dream or pressed harder for information, I feel that I could have been more supportive to one of the most important people in my life. I’m ashamed that I ignored this dream, and as always, I am learning from my mistakes – even if the only thing I could have done was provide a shoulder to cry on.

Not all is lost, though. This person is doing much better now, and I am especially sympathetic to her situation after having seen her in this dream. Maybe I was never meant to change the outcome, but simply understand and empathize with someone who I love so dearly.