Dealing with Dream People

Admittedly, we can occasionally be a smidge unreasonable. We generally feel that because we’re aware of our flaws, we’re a little bit ahead in the game (and we are so very aware of our flaws, both real and imagined). This blog serves many purposes, one of which being a medium for us to discharge some of our shit into the ether. We do not expect this to incite any change within ourselves, nor for anyone to identify with our bizarre “problems.” We are literally just throwing it out there, hoping that someone can at least be entertained by the weird crap we have to (choose to?) live and deal with.

Today, we are delving into the depths of our subconscious minds. Yes, dear reader, we are once again entering the realm of dreams (this time sans prophecy). We have never really mastered the art of lucid dreaming, and the dreams that we remember, more often than not, seem to take us down a rather unpleasant path. We’ve lost track of how many times we’ve come into work in the morning, shared the fucked up fragments of our upsetting dreams and mused over why nobody has invented some kind of magic pill to stop you from remembering your dreams (something more sustainable than getting super drunk every night).

Forget-Me-Nows are also not a great long-term option.

Even when we have good dreams, we’re left feeling cheated that we’re not actually on a beachy vacation with Matthew Crawley. No matter which way you spin it, at the end of the day, dreaming is a bitch. If not always, too often to be worth it.

These guys know what we’re talking about.

Now, we’re not going to rant about our nightmarish visions of swimming with sharks or chewing on tinfoil. These are things we can deal with, feeling safe in the knowledge that neither of them will ever actually happen with us. The dreams that actually cause us the most strife are the ones inhabited by terrible (sometimes terribly realistic) versions of people we know IRL, our family members, exes, friends, significant others, and random acquaintances. You know the kind, where you wake up crying because you’ve upset your mother or your girlfriend cheated on you...right? Just us? Great.

The thing is, we have this bad habit of carrying those feelings with us for the rest of the day. If Anya dreams that The Libertarian left her alone in a scary room full of alligators because he had to save his dog, she’s a little grumpy with his real life counterpart until he apologizes for his dream self’s actions. Totally rational. If Paul dreams that he was on an island full of people from high school and they cannibalized Anya for the sake of survival, she’s grumpy about that too. At least in these cases we can debrief in the morning, pour out our dream angst (often revealing deep seated fears) and go about our day.

Whatever gets you through the day.

We’re going to feel really, really alone if this has never happened to anyone else, but we’ve both had those dreams where we see someone we once knew, someone who fucked up big time and is now blacklisted, comes back to either haunt us or apologize. Somehow, it’s equally terrible either way. You wake up either half in love with some asshole who ripped your life apart and left you stress puking for months, or freshly wounded and pissed as hell. GOOD MORNING! TIME TO GO TO WORK!

For example, the other week Anya had a dream that literally combined every lifelong fear she has with her worst recurring dreams into a nightmare smorgasbord that couldn’t have been worse if it was concocted by her own self-hating alter ego. It was truly creative mixture of banal anxieties and deep seated fear rooted in life choices, involving the Cheating Bastard, an unwanted pregnancy (there’s no other kind ‘round these parts), and trouble navigating the subway. How are you supposed to recover from that shit when you can’t even roll over and say “Babe, I dreamed you were an asshole, fix it please?”

Reason number 153829 we need this shit.

Spending hours or even days in a funk born of an unfortunate nocturnal encounter with a ghost from the past is just not even fair. We’re trying to move on with our lives, deal with our shit, etc. and our goddamn subconscious just can’t let it go. Feeling a little guilty over x, y or z? Here, have a dream about how all of those things are ruining the lives of people you love. Maybe all of these shitty dreams are actually good for us, allowing our minds to work through some of our emotional baggage or current life challenges, but last time we checked, dream science wasn’t exactly a concrete field, so, for the time being, keep it.

Tell us we are or are not crazy?