I am sick of dreaming. I dream every night—horrible, exhausting, incessant dreams. I long for the profound rest afforded by nightly oblivion, but it does not come.
I have realized two things since I became dreamsick.
The first thing I have realized is that I no longer dream the carefree dreams that I dreamt as a child. Dreams that I could fly, dreams of shiny new possessions, dreams spent playing with friends. Where did those childhood dreams go? And when did they leave? Now my dreams are nothing but anxiety taking different forms. I dream often of travel, or that the world has ended, or both. My most frequent dream is that I am still in school and I am afraid I will not graduate because finals are coming up and I have not been attending class or doing the homework all semester long. When I wake I have to take a moment to assure myself of the reality that I did in fact already graduate high school, as well as college, and I will never have to worry about school ever again; but no matter the degree to which I concentrate on this reality, the dream persists.
But besides those more or less coherent narrative dreams of the sort I just described—the sort one is likely to tell their partner upon waking—there are other even less coherent dreams of a nature which begets no telling. These are the dreams you dream just after falling asleep—after a stressful day at work, for instance, when you dream vaguely that you are conducting the machinations of your job over and over and over. I have a note in my dream journal from many years ago, just after I started my first job as a barista in a drive-through coffee stand; it reads: “so many cups”. I remember the dream well; I woke feeling exhausted, and described the dream to my partner thusly: “It was like I was working all night long. It was terrible.” Then, of course, I got out of bed, got dressed, and went to work again, feeling like I hadn’t slept at all, the boundary between the dream and the day soft and fuzzy.
I recently began a job which requires the careful consideration of various kinds of bugs. All day long I am thinking about bugs; I go to sleep and I dream about bugs. All night long—bugs. There are no narratives to these dreams which I could tell, nor structures which I could describe, nor emotional contents which I could relate; they are just bugs.
But bugs are only the most benign of these dreams. The dream-vortex can be initiated by any tiny eddy in the currents of my mind: anxieties, problems, questions, decisions, duties, desires (especially desires—these are the most agonizing); but even things as simple as individual words, such as the word “perfunctorily,” can spawn maelstroms of dreams that last days, and as soon as I am released from one whirlpool I am thrown into another, tossed about by the rampant power of my unconscious mind endlessly.
This is the second thing I have realized about dreams. Dreams are not some grand marvel of the human mind. They are the mere exposition of the animal mind. They are to the mind what defecation is to the body. The mere waste product of a process by which an animal gains nourishment from the world. Investigate your dreams closely and you will be horrified: for they only reveal the fact of your mind as just barely evolved beyond the animal mind, a self-constructed labyrinth by the navigation of which the pitiful creature hopelessly attempts to make sense of the world. Dreams are nothing but the animal mind’s infernal reckoning of reality (both the reality outside itself and the reality of itself), fraught and agonizing for its inadequacy in the task.
These, I believe, are by far the most common sort of dream. The incomprehensible conscious experience of the unconscious mind’s junk product. The sort of dream which is forgotten as soon as it is dreamed, so long as one is not experiencing an excess of these dreams sufficient to make one ill. In such an excess, however, the dreams become unforgettable; they are formed by yesterday’s obsessions and they form tomorrow’s obsessions, completing a hellish ouroboros of mental deterioration that takes a person out of the world and further and further into his dreams, his dreams which have not the infinite depth or singular coherence of the world—dreams which enslave.
As my condition has progressed, my experience of time in dreams has drawn out, and my experience of waking reality has contracted. The effect is so strong now that I have the feeling that I spend the overwhelming majority of my time dreaming, and only brief moments of being awake; moments soured by my helpless encircling of the same dreams, so that my wakefulness is slowly losing its character as such and I find myself existing more and more as if I were dreaming always, at best helplessly pulled along through an absurd and anxiety-riddled narrative; at worst the mere dumb and ignorant witness to a terrifying reality without order or dimension.
If there was a pill one could take to prevent dreaming altogether, I would take it in a heartbeat. I could even see myself becoming addicted to such a pill. I could even see myself overdosing on it.
I imagine I could cure myself of my dreamsickness if I could prevent the dreams through some psychic technique, deployed while awake, while I still possess some semblance of will. Perhaps when I am lying in bed, finally having given up for the day, exhausted from resisting the dreams so that I can function during the day and then only hoping for at least the release of giving into them fully; perhaps then, at the precipice of the dream world, if I could instead make some great mental effort to rid myself of the dreams, and empty myself of all contents, I would instead fall into that abyss for which I long so dreadfully.