“L” is for “Losing Sleep” – An A-to-Z Blogging Challenge Post

For the A-to-Z Challenge 2017 I’m writing all about myself. Every post will be some random fact or bit of information about me that you may or may not have already known. Maybe you’ll learn something! Feel free to let me know! ^_^

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I know the way this one sounds, but it’s actually not going to be about anxiety or stress or anything like that (although they may play a part, depending on how you look at it).

I lose a great deal of sleep on a regular basis, and it’s all because my brain evidently refuses to switch off. Now, I have no problems actually falling asleep. Unlike my husband – who needs something like a TV show to distract his brain so he can just zone out and eventually fall asleep – I can go from fully awake to out cold in just a few short minutes. Falling asleep has never been my problem.

My problem is the dreams. 

Now, I’ve never had a sleep study or anything like that done, so I can’t rightly say that the dreams themselves are the problems, or if they’re just a symptom of my body refusing to sleep properly, but one thing is clear, and that’s the fact that I spend a very large amount of time in REM sleep. I’ve complained for years that I spend all night every night dreaming, and subsequently had people scoff and inform me (as though I’d never heard this information before) that we only actually dream in the few minutes that we spend in REM sleep, but what I’ve learned through specialized devices and apps that monitor your sleep, that “few minutes” for me is more like “a third of the night”.

I have blockbuster full-length motion picture dreams, you guys, and I’m not even exaggerating. My dreams feature a huge number of characters, intricate plots, and a flurry of emotions. They are extremely detailed and extremely vivid. I’ve written down dreams that took a dozen pages to fully explain, and I’ve woken up from dreams absolutely devastated by the events that unfurled because I was absolutely convinced they’d actually happened. I’ve had dreams that made me feel like weeks passed in the time I spent asleep, and I’ve had dreams that absolutely exhausted me, both emotionally and physically, to the point that I’d swear I never slept at all.

The best part, however, is that there’s basically nothing I, or anyone else can do about it. Sleeping pills are a common suggestion, but those drugs are specifically designed to put you to sleep. They do very little to actually keep you asleep, which is where my problem lies. I drift in and out of my sleep cycle, spending more time in the “practically awake” phase than in the “deep asleep” phase, and I’ve been told flat out that there is nothing currently available that addresses that particular issue. So I guess, for the foreseeable future I just continue to lose sleep on a regular basis.

At least the dreams are good writing fodder. 🙂

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How do you sleep? Any troubles at all? Any outrageous dreams? Feel free to leave a comment!

Night Time Nuisances

Do you ever dream about struggling with a task that you just can’t accomplish?

I have lots of recurring dreams; they’re not necessarily always exactly the same, but certain key points pop up again and again, and one such dream is an exceptionally frustrating inability to get to the dentist’s office.

I’m not sure why it’s always a dentist, but that’s always how the dream starts. I’ll be off somewhere – it doesn’t really matter where – and recall that I have to get to the dentist. There’s always a fairly urgent reason for me to need to make this appointment; sometimes it’s because I’m in horrible pain, sometimes it’s because my teeth keep cracking or falling out, sometimes it’s because I’ve got some kind of dental surgery scheduled. So I’ll rush off to try and make my appointment, but the dentist’s office will not be where I expect it to be, and I’ll spend the rest of the dream panicking, trying to find it before the day ends and the office shuts down.

Does that sound frustrating or just ridiculous? Well, it’s both.

I had one of these such dreams a few nights ago. I started out in a park, spending time with my family, when I suddenly remembered that I had to get to the dentist because I was having a rotten tooth pulled. I didn’t have my car, but I did have a bike, so I hopped on it and took off down the road. In the dream I was riding down the Main Street in the town next to the one I grew up in, but it wasn’t really that street. I believed it was that street, but because dreams like to twist reality, the street was full of buildings that do not exist on the real street. I rode down this street and up again, searching for the building that I was sure was the dentist’s office, but it just wasn’t there. I took out my phone and called the office, explaining that I knew I was late, but that I was on my way and was going to be there any moment. It was only after I hung up that it occurred to me I could have asked for directions, or at least an address, so I tried to call back. That’s when things got really frustrating, because for some reason my phone denied any existence of the call. It was not in the log that usually records every ingoing or outgoing call, and the number itself had somehow erased itself from existence, both in my mind and in the phone. So I tried another method; I searched for the office using Google Maps. This method presented with multiple problems; first my fingers refused to be able to hit the keys properly, misspelling the office’s name over and over again, then Google denied any existence of said office, and finally it kept giving me directions to offices that weren’t even in the same province as me.

When I finally woke up I was actually beating the crap out of my phone, which was daring to try and wake me up with my alarm app and had subsequently earned my half-awake super-enraged ire.

What does a dream like this mean? I’m guessing stress, and feelings of helplessness or inadequacy. Why is it always a dentist appointment? Your guess is as good as mine on that one.

Isn’t the sleeping brain a curious thing?

Do you ever have any recurring dreams? Are they good ones or the kind that make you wake up angry, scared, or frustrated? Are the details always the same or are there just basic points that repeat within a new environment? Please share!

Fiction Fragment Fridays: Losers

Another drabble for you on this fine Friday, courtesy of the WTF-ness of my dreaming brain. Feel free to assume that I have deep, deep problems.

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She wondered how she’d come to find herself in such an odd situation, sharing this enormous old mansion with all of her coworkers. It didn’t seem…proper. And yet, here they all were, rearranging furniture to give everyone their own space.

The men shifted an old couch and out skittered a tiny white mouse, and suddenly all was pandemonium. The men jumped and shouted and panicked, but not her. She grabbed a poker from the fireplace and – in a single movement – skewered the rodent through the belly.

“Man up, you losers,” she growled, and stalked off to hunt for more prey.

Dreams: Window to the Soul or Emotional Torture?

Have you ever gotten angry with someone for something they did…in your dreams? I don’t mean getting mad while still dreaming, but actually waking up and looking at that person and genuinely wanting to punch them in the face for what your subconscious imagined them doing during your brain’s nightly firing of neurons?

She may look docile, but she’s dreaming about using that toy spading fork to stab her enemies in the eyes.

Humans can be extremely unreasonable creatures in a great number of circumstances, but I think this may possibly be the most unreasonable reaction possible. And yet, if you’re one of many people who have had this kind of dream and experienced the aftereffects, you understand exactly what I’m talking about. You wake up and you know that it was a dream, you know that it was just your stupid brain making up weird stories with no basis in truth or reality…but you still look at that person and your body fills up with rage and you have to seriously restrain yourself from making an ass of yourself by calling them out.

I have these kinds of dreams constantly, and it can be very exhausting. I suspect that it’s a very normal thing to experience conflict and upsetting situations in dreams, but that most people forget those conflicts by the time they’ve woken up. As someone who has always had very vivid and intricate dreams – and almost always remembers them upon waking – I have to actually deal with those conflicts and the unreasonable emotion they awaken.

For example, one night not too long ago, I was dreaming that my sister-in-law and I were shopping with our daughter’s in a large and complicated mall. Sis-in-law suggested that we should get the girls tattoos and I laughed, thinking it was a joke because the girls are only 3 and 4. But then, when I turned around, sis-in-law had disappeared with both girls. I went on a frantic search through the ridiculously busy and difficult-to-navigate mall until I eventually spotted them at the food court. I relaxed for a half a moment until I saw that my daughter – my 3-year-old daughter – now had a tattoo on the back of her hand. I woke up absolutely livid, even though I know damn well that my sis-in-law would never do something so idiotic.

The human brain is wonderful at tricking itself into believing in nonsense, and I think that’s part of the problem with these kinds of dreams. There have been studies that show that people can be – quite easily, in fact – tricked into “remembering” events from their childhood that never really happened, so long as they are given sufficient evidence (other people’s testimonies, for example) that the event did occur. It’s not a far stretch, then, that your own brain should be able to trick you into believing that something it made up really happened, at least long enough to set off all the hormones and emotional responses that would equate with such an event. Thus, you wind up with the typical stories, like grown adults flipping out on their spouses for any number of events that were completely fabricated within their own mind.

And while I know that it’s entirely unreasonable to act on the emotion you took away with you from dreamland, I can’t really blame the people who do because, let’s face it…your sleeping brain can be a complete asshole sometimes. For example, I am in a completely happy monogamous relationship with my husband. I trust him, and he (I assume) trusts me, and we love each other very much. And yet, on a fairly regular basis, my brain will have me dreaming about him being unfaithful in some way. I have woken up from dreams feeling like my heart just got ripped out, and I have woken up from dreams certain that I was going to break his face while he was still sleeping. Luckily I’m a (moderately) reasonable person who knows the difference between dreams and reality, but that doesn’t make the emotions that follow such a dream any less real. Eventually, when the fallout wears off and I’m able to take a deep breath and think again, I blame my brain for being a total pain-in-the-ass jerk.

Dreams…the window to the soul, or an open opportunity for your subconscious to torture you and see how much of a fool it can make you act like?

I know I’m not the only one. Who else here has woken up mad as hell, or bawling your eyes out, even though you know that what you just dreamed about didn’t really happen? Have you ever accidentally acted on those feelings before you could bring yourself back to reality? Share!

Theory: Only Your Own Brain Knows How Screwed Up You Really Are

Dreams have always been something that amaze me, perhaps in part because I have so many of them. Whether due to a sleep issue that keeps me in REM sleep more often than I should be, or simply because my imagination doesn’t like to turn off, I seem to spend significantly more time dreaming than most people I know. Therefore I spend a lot of time contemplating my dreams, from the interesting and confusing, to the downright “what the hell”-level insanity.

“Welcome to your messed-up subconscious. We’ll be your guides.”

I’m not a person who believes that specific symbols in dreams mean the same thing no matter who is dreaming them, but I do believe that what we dream about says something about us if we can only figure out what. And since I often have the same dreams over and over, I thought I’d share a few of them.

Recurring Dream #1: Math is the Devil

One dream that I have so often it makes me seriously wonder about myself is the one in which I’m back in school. The dream can vary in a number of different ways, but there are a few key factors that are always the same. One is that my best friend is always there as well, regardless of whom else the dream my feature. Another is that the school in question is outrageously enormous, a sprawling city that is almost impossible to navigate and usually results in my wandering around for hours just trying to find my classroom. But the most important key factor is the math. This dream always features me back in math class and I’m failing miserably. Every time I have this dream, I’ve somehow managed to miss an entire semester’s worth of math classes and thus am excruciatingly far behind. This is always frustrating and panic-inducing because I don’t even know how I managed to miss so many classes. Often I have a notebook full to the brim with homework that I didn’t do, with no idea how I even have it. This dream always results in some major anxiety as I try to teach myself advanced calculus so that I won’t fail the course. I’ve never completed this dream in any way…either pass or fail. I always wake while still panicking.

Recurring Dream #2: Teenage War

One of my stranger and more involved dreams, this one features myself and everyone I knew from high school participating in some crazy, futuristic war. We’re always in this weird indoor town – there’s houses and fences and grass and trees, but you can also see huge white walls and a ceiling around the borders of the place. Everything is brightly lit and almost cheery-looking, but there are fires and explosions and gunfire everywhere. My classmates and I are fighting against some strange robotic army, like a messed-up combination between the Skynet robots and the Daleks. It’s all very cinematic and exciting. There’s danger around every corner, but never in this particular dream am I even the least bit scared or concerned. I’m just running around with an enormous gun, taking out robots. Often in this dream myself and a select few others (usually my husband and my best friend) will go on a secret mission that involves sneaking through these air-duct-like tunnels beneath and above the “town”. This dream has never found completion either. I always just keep dreaming about the fighting until I wake up.

Recurring Dream #3: Dumped

This one doesn’t pop up nearly as often as the other ones, but every so often I’m plagued by dreams in which my husband is either cheating on me, has dumped me, or is acting as though he’s never met me before. These dreams are weird in the sense that I don’t have the reaction you would normally have in such situations. Rather than being furious or feeling horribly betrayed or what-have-you, my reaction is always more childish, more like that of a teenager whose found out that their crush likes someone else. I always feel terribly sad, but in a pathetic, self-pitying kind of way, and usually when I have a dream like this I wake up still feeling depressed and vulnerable.

Recurring Dream #4: The Never-Ending House

The other dreams I can at least think of a little bit of some kind of explanation for, but this one flabbergasts me. On a regular basis I will dream about my husband and I moving into a new house. Oftentimes my parents or his or both will be there, I guess to help us move in, and it’ll be a bit like a party. The weird part comes when, inevitably, I’ll be looking for something and discover that there are extra parts to the house that we didn’t know were there when we bought it. I’ll find entire extra wings filled with numerous bedrooms and bathrooms, big game rooms. Sometimes it’ll be an enormous basement that we just somehow never noticed the stairs for. Sometimes it’ll be a basement, but it’s like this giant underground catacomb under the house that winds up being full of old furniture and boxes full of old artifacts. Most often, however, it’ll just seem like the hallways are never-ending. Like, there will be this one hallway full of doors that lead to bedrooms and bathrooms, but one of those doors will lead to another hallway which is also full of bedrooms and bathrooms, and so on and so on. In these dreams I’m never confused as to where all this extra space is coming from or how we never noticed it before, but sometimes I’ll find myself getting lost, going up and down stairways and not able to find my way back to where I started from. There’s never anything scary or upsetting about these dreams; on the contrary, usually I’m super-excited to have found that my new house is a hundred times bigger than I thought it was.

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So what do you think? Am I completely insane? I can see signs of inner anxiety, maybe some self-doubt and uncertainty about the future, but that’s all guessing, really. For the most part I look at these dreams – which I have on a very regular basis – and I can’t help but wonder to myself if my brain is playing games with me. Surely fighting robot wars and having a house that just seems to grow and grow can’t really mean anything, and yet my subconscious sees fit to throw those same images back at me all the time. It’s a great mystery and I will be the first in line the day they figure out a way to record dreams, because this insanity bears deeper investigation and analysis.

How about you? Any crazy dreams that show up in your mind regularly? What do you think about dream analysis? Please share!

When I Was a Kid I Believed…

Kids are wonderfully imaginative, intelligent, creative little creatures who have a tendency to amaze you at every twist and turn. They also, on occasion, can be dumb as stumps. Kids will often go from doing something quite smart and skillful, to doing or saying something that can only elicit a shake of the head and a, “What the hell is wrong with you?”

And I’m not picking on my daughter this time. This one is all on me.

Behold the face of childish ignorance.

When I was a kid I believed that…

…if I held my legs together as tight as I could for long enough, the need to go pee would magically go away.

…if I peeled too much skin (I had a creepy obsession with peeling sunburnt skin, or the edges of cuts and scraps), I would dig right through to the bone.

…the lyrics to “I Saw Her Standing There” were actually “I’d never dance with a number“. Lord knows what I thought that was supposed to mean.

…if you ever took your wedding ring off for any reason, it meant that you were no longer married.

…when people told me how much I looked like my father they were being horribly mean because they were saying that I looked like a man.

…if you threw away any perishable gift (like flowers) you were ungrateful and unappreciative. I had slight hoarder tendencies as a kid…and as an adult.

…tattoos were applied by dipping a needle (like a sewing needle) in ink and pricking the skin one dot of color at a time.

…you couldn’t think of a relative as being attractive because it was creepy and wrong.

…there was absolutely nothing wrong at all with eating Mr Noodles for lunch every single day.

…if you filled the tub past the overflow all the extra water poured down into the bathroom wall.

…fish in any form other than rectangular breaded sticks was absolutely disgusting.

…spaghetti, ravioli, macaroni, and rigatoni was all amazing, but lasagna was gross.

…my house was haunted by the ghosts of previous owners, despite the fact that the only other owners the house had ever had were very much alive.

…my next-door neighbors were the “Smileys” (their last name was Smalley).

…there were ancient secret compartments and tunnels hidden in my house (which was less than three decades old, by the way).

…becoming whatever you wanted to be when you grew up was as simple as deciding what you wanted to be and being it.

What about you? What crazy, silly, and downright foolish things did you believe when you were a kid?

Accountability Tuesdays – Week 29

Before I get on with the accountability today, I want to mention a couple of things.

First, a huge hug to the new followers I’ve been getting on this blog and on Twitter. I’m not sure exactly what I’ve been doing lately that suddenly has people sneaking in out of the shadows toward my sites, but I’m not one to look a gift horse in the mouth. Welcome, thanks for coming, and I hope you stick around! 🙂

Second, on a whim I recently tried Googling myself, and I was quite amused to find that the first three results were actually me. I rather don’t need my 9gag profile popping up on Google, but I was happy to see that the second result was this blog and the third was my 750Words.com account. It’s a good sign when your real persona pops up on Google, right?

Third: a call out for info and/or advice. I’ve Googled this problem many times but I can never seem to find anything that quite matches my issue. I’ve been having trouble sleeping again (it seems to happen for several weeks at a time, a few times a year), and the issue as far as I can describe it is that I spend an inordinate amount of time in dream sleep (REM sleep), meaning that my rest isn’t, well…restful. I’m waking up feeling like hell even when I sleep 9 or more hours, and it’s very wearing. I’ve consulted my doctor before and his only suggestion was to try antidepressants, which I thought was a little silly and insulting since I’m pretty damn confident that I’m not depressed. So since I can’t seem to find any information on my own, I thought I’d ask here on the off-chance someone may know something or suffer from similar. Help?

Okay, on to the accountability.

Health and Body Image Goal

If I’m totally honest, I’ve plummeted miserably on this one. I’ve been doing no form of exercise and have been eating rather terribly. It doesn’t help that I’m experiencing sleep issues, as mentioned above. I keep trying to convince myself to get up a little early in the mornings (before it’s scorching hot out) and do my zombie runs, but I haven’t been able to manage it because I’m so damn tired. I need some motivation, terribly, and that’s a fact.

Editing Goal

It’s been a surprisingly busy week so I haven’t managed to sit down at my laptop for very long periods of time, but I’m still (slowly) plugging away at my supernatural romance. Really, really looking forward to finishing so I can submit it to a publisher and move on to my zombie apocalypse.

1,000,000 Word Goal

It hasn’t been a great week, but I did manage to get a few words in. Between blogging and a return to 750Words, I managed to get in 4802 words this week. I’m hoping to ramp it up this week through a series of ideas I’ve compiled, one of which is to use 750Words.com in the mornings to empty my brain of the dreams I’m plagued with every night. It might be a pro-bono situation…I get extra words, and maybe writing down the dreams will make them go the hell away. Starting this Sunday, as well, I plan to start reading The Artist’s Way and work my way through the 12-week process, so look forward to that.

29 weeks down, 23 to go. Here’s hoping the remaining 23 start to look up a little!

Do What You Can’t Not Do

A couple of weeks ago I put the baby to bed, left my husband downstairs playing the latest Assassin’s Creed game, and snuggled up in my bed with a bag of chips to watch Cloud Atlas. Less than ten minutes into the movie I put the chips away because there was so much dialogue – and some of it difficult to catch –  that I wanted to make sure I was hearing everything properly. The movie is an aquired taste, I think (and the reviews I read on the book afterward would have me come to the same conclusion) but personally, I enjoyed it. Yes, I enjoyed it in an “oh my god this is interesting but my head hurts” kind of way.

But this post isn’t about the movie or the book (which I would like to read someday when I get a chance). No, this post is actually about one particular line from the movie (and presumably the book) that really struck a chord with me. The quote in question was spoken by one character while trying to convince another to help her expose a huge corporation of evil deeds when doing so was sure to ruin his career and possibly his life.

The quote was this: “You have to do whatever it is that you can’t not do.”

This turn of phrase gave me pause, and I found myself thinking about it several more times throughout the course of the movie. As soon as the movie was over I grabbed my phone and wrote myself a memo: “Talk about this quote on blog.”

The reason I wanted to write a blog post dedicated to this quote isn’t just because I think it was a neat saying. I wanted to share this quote because I think it exemplifies very well exactly what is wrong with so many people’s lives these days. That is, we’re all not doing the things that we can’t not do.

By “can’t not do” I of course mean the things that define us, the things that make us who we are, the things that give us joy and pleasure in our lives. I’m talking about the things we’ve always dreamed of doing, the things we always saw ourselves doing, and the things we’ve neglected to do for any number of reasons (finances, fear, discouragement, etc). I’m talking about the things that people think of on their deathbeds and wish they’d had the courage to just do, because now they regret not doing them.

Obviously it’s not always just as simple as doing something because you want to, but consider how many people give up what makes them happy because it’s easier to give up than to work for it. Young adults give up on their childhood dream jobs because they don’t know how to go about them, or because they’re afraid they don’t have the skill, or because they’re discouraged by over-critical parents or teachers who tell them it’s just not going to happen. Parent’s give up the hobbies that they love because it takes money away from the family, or takes time away from the children, or because their peers convince them that such things are for children. Employers of every type give up everything from their personal time to their dignity because it’s what the boss says they have to do. People of every age, race, religion, gender, and social class give up things they love and cherish because some outside stimulus tells them they should. Sometimes that outside stimulus outright demands that you give up what you love.

I say that’s bullshit, if you’ll forgive me the term. There’s such a thing as responsiblities and realism, of course, but that doesn’t change the fact that these are things we love, things we need, things that ultimately make us the people we are. Why should we give up? Why shouldn’t we at least try  to strive for our dreams? Sure not every little kid can become an astronaut, but for the ones who truly dream of it with all their heart and soul, why shouldn’t they be given the chance, the opportunity to reach for the stars? We shouldn’t give up our hopes and dreams based on the idea that they might not happen. We shouldn’t give up our little joys just because life tends to get in the way. If you truly love something, if you truly dream of something, you should figure out how to make it work.

I challenge you today to think hard about the dreams you gave up, the hobbies you stopped taking  part in, the little pleasures you allowed to be taken away from you. When you’ve done that I want you to imagine yourself years from now, old and worn and on your deathbed. You know you’re going to die any moment. What do you regret having not done?

Myself, I write because I can’t not write. It may sound childish to some, but it’s the truth. I know, in my heart, that years from now when I’m old and worn, if I’ve never published anything, or at least tried as hard as I possibly could to publish something, I’ll die with regret. Writing is one of the things that makes me who I am and I can’t not do it, even if it sometimes makes my life difficult, even if it sometimes feels pointless.

What is it that you can’t not do?

Taking Lucid Dreams to a New Level

As long as I can remember, I’ve had very vivid dreams. Where some people can tell me the general plot of their dream and who was present, I could tell you what the characters were wearing, the layout of the room we were in, the exact emotions I was feeling, and any other number of finite details. I kept a dream journal once, out of a curiosity of whether I might be able to interpret some of them, but it was ridiculously time consuming. I could wake up from a dream and start scribbling in a notebook, and my arm would get sore before I’d finished. I have dreams in that journal that take up more than ten letter-sized pages, front and back. I don’t have dreams, you see, so much as subconscious full-length motion pictures.

But last night’s dream took the cake in a way that compels me to write about it. I’m going to give you a basic outline of how the dream panned out, and at the end I’ll explain why this one in particular freaked me out a bit.

So the dream took place in the area of the Kearl Lake plant where I used to work. There’s an area set aside from the actual plant where that area’s workers have trailers set up for lunch rooms, changing rooms, offices, and so on. That’s where I was. I was wearing all my outdoor work gear; boots, coveralls, outerwear, toque, etc, and I was wearing a backpack. As near as I could figure, I’d just arrived for my shift, but I couldn’t seem to recall how I’d gotten there. Additionally, it was nighttime, even though I work day shifts.

So I’m wandering around the trailers, and there seems to be some kind of party going on. For a while I was just wandering around confused and couldn’t figure out what was happening, but after a while I realized that PCL (one of the construction companies that works on the site) was throwing some kind of festival or something. I could go into great detail, but suffice it to say that there were parades going up and down the streets, carnival rides in between the site equipment, and food stands around the trailers.

Aside from the crazy carnival stuff occurring, there were a few things that differentiated this dream from reality. For one thing, one of my cousins was there, even though he works at a Sobeys store in Nova Scotia. I remember him trying to tell me something about the woods outside the site, and he began sinking into some kind of quicksand. It turned out to be a joke he was playing on me. Ha ha, very funny. Then my husband’s cousin, who is working on becoming a continuing care assistant (also in Nova Scotia) appeared, and she started dragging me in and out of the trailers, snagging treats and things for me, which I stuffed in my backpack. At one point we were guarding some kind of large signature board, which, evidently, everyone who visited the carnival was supposed to sign. Sometime after this I went looking for my coworkers, but every trailer I went into looked the same, that is, a lunch trailer with no appliances and three people I didn’t know sitting there looking at me like I was nuts. I kept leaving and moving to another trailer, and it kept being the same trailer with those same three people. Eventually, at some point, I realized that people were lining up for the bus to take us back to camp, and I wanted to go join the line but my boots had disappeared and I couldn’t find them.

I really could go into a lot more detail, but for the purposes of this story, this is all you need to know: the dream made very little sense. It wasn’t an outrageously insane dream with purple elephants and giant plants trying to eat people, but it was definitely removed from reality. There were people there who shouldn’t have been, things happening that shouldn’t have been happening, and all in all nothing made any sense.

So here’s the weird thing…I was absolutely convinced it was real. Remember at the beginning when I said that I couldn’t remember how I’d gotten there? I was genuinely freaking out throughout the entire dream because of that fact. I could remember falling asleep in my own bed at home after spending the day with my husband and daughter, and then all of a sudden I was at the work site, wearing my work clothes. Throughout the dream I kept trying to find my supervisor to tell him that I thought I was losing my mind because I couldn’t remember anything from the past 6 days and I had no idea how I’d managed to get on a plane and show up at site without recalling any of it. And yes, I’ve had dreams before that I would have sworn were real while I was dreaming them, but this one was truly intense. I can actually remember thinking, “The only way this would make sense is if its a dream, which I know it isn’t!” I can vividly recall paying particular attention to the way my legs felt when I walked, the way the wind cut at my face, the way my fingertips burned from the cold, and thinking, “I can feel everything, so I have to be awake!”

Needless to say, by the time I woke up I was pretty freaked out. I’ve never had a dream quite that vivid before, one in which I was actually desperate to prove that it was a dream, but every instinct and physical sense I have was telling me otherwise. It was a new level of weird, that’s for sure, which is why I felt the need to share it.

So how about it? Have you ever had a dream like this, that was so unbelievably vivid you were actually starting to think you were losing your mind? Please share, so I don’t feel like the only lunatic here!