Begging for Reality

I've mentioned before that I have extraordinarily vivid dreams. Dreams that, once remembered, cannot be forgotten.

I don't like my dream world.

It isn't that I'm complaining, really, but for all the jokes I make about the idiosyncrasies of my subconscious mind, it often leaves me with this feeling of being permanently unsettled. In my dreams, my fears come true. I relive my dad's funeral. I am forced by circumstance into prostitution. I am raped. My mother dies. My best friend murders my sister. My husband cheats.

Even the banalities make it into my dreams, the petty worry that my sister will take up smoking or that my boss will be ashamed of me.

I suppose I shouldn't call them dreams. They are nightmares.

And they haunt me every night.

Something intriguing about my dreams, something I've not heard from anyone else, is that they all seem to take place on the same plane. They don't start and stop in different places, at different times. They chronicle themselves. While I am dreaming one thing, I am also aware of what I dreamed last night, and how that particular place is just across the plane. The plane, usually, is a barren forest, where darkness rules and I can never run as fast as I would like.

Because of this, my dreams often morph into one another. I have recurring dreams, and in the middle of one dream, I will often remember a detail from another dream and proceed to redream it, no matter my desire (or lack thereof) to experience it again. I often wake up feeling empty and wrong, and usually fatigued. Real life is so much better than my dreams, where nothing makes sense and everything is frightening.

Many people seem to think my memory of the dreams is quite funny. It's something different about me. Something they remember. But to tell the truth, I would rather not dream at all.