They're Back :(

But I hope that they're not back to stay.  What am I talking about, you ask?  My nightmares.  I have talked about them before, a few times.  Well, the nightmares had pretty much gone away after meeting G. I'm not being mushy or anything; it's just a fact.  I have always been able to remember my dreams extremely vividly, which sucks because it means that my brain remembers how it thinks it would feel to die in numerous ways, being decapitated, burned to death, drowned, shot and raped.  None of these things are ones that I would like to remember, yet I do.  Anyway, as of a week or two ago, I stopped being able to remember my dreams at all.  Which was really weird for me, but I took it as a good sign.  When my nightmares were at there worst, meaning up to 8 dreams of seeing everyone I love be murdered in different ways on a nightly basis, and having it either be my fault or just not able to stop it from happening, and either knowing I'm next and waking up before I get killed or knowing I'm next and then getting killed, occasionally wandering around in my dream for a while before realizing I'm dead, waking up screaming and/or crying and not getting enough sleep at all because I'm not going to let myself sleep until I pass out from exhaustion, that is when I sought help from a therapist.  They did nothing for me, but they did tell me that it isn't normal to be able to remember your dreams as vividly as I always have, and that it means I never reach the deepest level of sleep.  So anyway, when I stopped being able to remember my dreams, I just figured that it was because I was finally reaching the deepest level of sleep.  Or the other possibility is that my nightmares had returned and my brain was trying to repress the horror, which it never did before despite the fragile mental state the nightmares put me in.  The latter option seemed unlikely, so I decided that it was the former.  I'm still not sure which it was but I guess that it doesn't really matter.  Anyway, when G woke me up this morning to say goodbye before leaving to the airport for Washington D.C.  (He's going for five days for a conference for his work as a therapist with the Center for Human Services.), I was extremely grateful to be awakened, because I was having a nightmare.

I guess that I should explain to you the way that I dream, since there are many different ways.  I usually dream in the first-person, meaning that it's just like real-life where I am experiencing the things going on directly and that I am making my own decisions. Sometimes it is more like I am being filmed but still feeling what "I", or my body, is experiencing and still making my own decisions, but not often.  I always dream in realistic color, meaning nothing is super vivid or dully colored and it is not in black and white either.  I can hear people's voices, and their voices are realistic.  I can speak (except for sometimes if I try to scream but I can't) and my voice is also realistic.  Sometimes there is music, but it is not like background music with no obvious source.  It is from someone singing or me listening to music or rarely a television being on.  I almost always have a cell phone, but can never dial 911.

DON'T READ THE NEXT PART IF YOU DON'T HAVE A STRONG STOMACH.  I'M SERIOUS. I'M ACTUALLY FIGHTING BACK NAUSEA JUST RECALLING IT.  IF YOU HAVE A QUEASY STOMACH, JUST SKIP AHEAD TO THE NEXT PART IN ALL CAPS.

So now that you have that bit of background, here is my nightmare from last night.  Usually my nightmares involve a logical fear for my life.  But this one was just creepy and scary.  Nobody tried to murder me but I was tortured.  My dreams do not have narration, which might be helpful sometimes for my awake self to understand what happened, but the me in the dream usually feels like the situation is normal and understands what is going on, even if I don't understand everything after waking up.  In this dream, I was in some sort of an orphanage.  I was the age that I am now, 20, and the other kids there ranged in age from about 14 to 20.  I'm not sure if it was an orphanage, but no parents were in the dream, and I am not sure if the dream me's parents had died or if "I" had just never had parents.  But as it was, we were all in this large, old, dirty building, and that was normal for us.  The only "adult", not age-wise since most of us were over 18 but more like the person who was in charge, who we saw was this woman who was probably in her 40's.  We all feared her, because she could do things.  Like controlling people's minds and making them do what she wanted them to, where they knew what they were doing and even if they didn't want to do it, they had no ability not to do it.  There was one boy who was probably around my age and he was the only person I actually knew there.  We were friends, but neither one of us had a name.  Anyway, the lead-up to this part was fuzzy, but the lady mind-controlled this boy.  Somehow I could read his thoughts too, which was weird.  She made him cut off my fingers and my toes one by one.  It was excruciatingly painful, especially since it was less of cutting them off and more like breaking them off, with large pliers.  And in the boy's thoughts, he was crying while he didn't it, but he had to do it because of her power.  And then she made me eat them (by mind controlling me), which was the most horrible thing ever.  Shortly after that happened, we all escaped while she was asleep, which I have no idea why we didn't do that earlier.  There were probably about a hundred of us.  And none of us had shoes or coats.  We all had ragged tee shirts and pants, not even socks.  And it was cold and it was rainy but we had to escape and for some reason we hadn't been able to until that night.  I'm not sure how we escaped either, because the dream did that thing where it just skips a part and all of a sudden, you're somewhere else, but you aren't wondering how you got there because somehow in your dream you think it makes sense (Does that happen to other people or just me?).  Anyway, we were all running away and it was cold and wet and hard not to slip and fall (especially for me since I no longer had toes)  And we were running for what must have been hours.  And then all of a sudden we just realized that it was useless.  She would send her army and they would find us, because they would smell us.  Somehow the dream me knew that she had an army of scary men with an incredibly heightened sense of smell, even though I hadn't seen them in the actual dream.  And so we just stopped.  And we gave up.  And we waited for them to find us and bring us back and torture us.  And that is when G woke me up.

THIS IS WHERE IT'S SAFE TO READ AGAIN, FOR YOU QUEASY STOMACHED PEOPLE.

And after I woke up, I couldn't help but be mad at my dream self and at all of the other dream people for just giving up like that.  Really? You worked so hard to get away from that horrible place, run miles in the rain and the cold WITH NO TOES.  You are sure to get sick, probably pneumonia, and probably also terribly infected feet and hands, you go through all of that and then just throw it all away?!  What is wrong with you people?!  And then I realized that I wasn't going to accomplish anything by getting mad at my dream self, so I told G goodbye and haven't gone back to bed since.  It was really early in the morning and I'll take a nap later, but I had to get the dream out of my head first.  Then I'll watch something pleasant and funny, and then when I do take a nap later, hopefully the bad dream will be nothing more than a bad memory and a nauseating blog post.

And, because any picture I could put on here would either be deeply disturbing or completely unrelated, here is a song instead.  It's sort of relevant, even though I don't have night terrors.  And it should give you a tiny idea of the kind of music I like, although I also enjoy some folk music, most classic rock, some hip hop, and even the occasional pop song.