Dreams

So, I have this recurring dream. It’s the same scenario played out in different ways each time. It’s kinda terrifying, but at this point, I’ve had it so many times that I know it’s a dream while I’m dreaming. But I can never get out of it until I wake up.

Here’s my dream last night: I’m at home, in my old house in Happy Garden. The doorbell rings, I open the door to see who’s outside. It’s a man with a gun. Now the right play would be to quickly shut the door and hide behind a wall – bullets don’t go through walls right? I never do that. Dude outside threatens to shoot me if I don’t let him in. I refuse. More people from his gang show up. They all have weapons. Soon, my front porch is overrun with men with weapons. By this time, I shut the door and try to exit my house through the back door. But these guys somehow surround my house and are waiting for me there too. So I’m stuck in my house, with nowhere to go, panicking, worried about my life. When one of them manages to enter my house and is about to attack me, I wake up.

This dream (nightmare?) has occurred many times in the past. It’s always me, in my Happy Garden home, and the men are trying to get into my home to attack me. The other bits change. It could be day or night time, sometimes they have knives or parangs, the men look different. But I always wake up when one of them enter the house and is about to kill me.

It feels pretty terrifying at times (I wonder if I yell out in my sleep), but I don’t do anything different. I’m not sure if I even have the option to. It’s like a movie that repeats itself now and then. I’ve become accustomed to having it, and have stopped looking for any meaning. But if there is a point to it, I wonder what it could be?

On another note – why do you wake up just before you are attacked or killed in a dream? Is it a coincidence? Do you happen to dream right before you wake up? Does your body know that you’re going to wake up? Or do you only remember bits of the dreams before you wake up? Does dream time work like in Inception (where hours in the dream world could mean only seconds in real life)? What is my mind trying to say?

The other day I read something interesting: When you remember a past event, you’re actually remembering the last time you remembered it, not the event itself. I don’t know if it’s common knowledge but it has been explored in one of my favorite movies of all time – Memento. Anyway, reading about it depressed me a bit. It means unless you have photographic memory, each time you try to remember something in the past, you start to lose pieces of it. Details will change, events will change, feelings will change, and eventually the memory will be drastically different from what it once was. It sucks, but that’s how our brain works. It’s one of the reasons why I like writing down my thoughts whenever they pop into my mind. I know they won’t be the same if I think about them again in the future – how I felt, what I was thinking about etc will all be different after a few days or weeks. If I’m in front of the computer, I try to blog them, if I’m out and about, I make little notes on my phone to write about them later. In addition to thoughts, one of the things I like recording are my dreams. Which brings me to writing about a dream I had last night. I recorded it as soon as I woke up, but details had already started to fade as soon as I started typing them into my phone:

I dreamed about beating up a politician. I had no idea why or what made me do it but I did it. He was unarmed and I had a stick with me. He was defenseless. Also, this took place while I was holidaying with my friends.

Anyway I was caught on camera, because I made no attempt to cover up, and I still fled from the scene of the crime. The authorities dropped by the hotel to question me and they told me that I would be going to jail. So for the next few nights, I declined going out with my friends. I just stayed in the hotel. I said I was gonna go to prison any time, so they should have fun without me.

I didn’t end up in jail, and our holiday concluded with no drama. Maybe I couldn’t dream what the interior of a jail was like, so my brain skipped that part. Or maybe the worrying was done on purpose to make me feel worse. Things could have been interesting or fun in jail? I don’t know. Fucking brain.

But during my time alone, I kept thinking to myself, oh shit my life is ruined. Nobody is going to hire me anymore. I’ll be a stain in society. I was going to have a criminal record. I wasn’t going to get a decent salary anymore. I was so worried. And I kept thinking, why the fuck did I do that? I wasn’t instructed to. Nobody convinced me or paid me to beat up that old man. I did it on my own! I was filled with regret.

And so, this morning I woke up feeling like I never want to go to jail, ever. Need someone to beat up a politician? Don’t call me.