Dreaming is… weird. I know I’m hardly making a revolutionary statement when I say that products of your subconscious that tell odd disjointed stories most often without actual sound or colour are strange, but there’s really no other word for them.
What I find particularly strange about dreams is how there seem to be so many different types, for me. There are good dreams and bad dreams, dreams about all kinds of different topics, dreams that are realistic and dreams that are way too weird to be taken as reality.
Perhaps most weird to me about my dreams is that I never have lucid dreams, where you know you’re dreaming and are able to control your dreams, but I do have dreams that influence reality or are influenced by reality pretty constantly. Some of my least favourite dreams are ones that make me move my body. I’ll be having a perfectly calm dream about jumping on a trampoline, but once I move to jump off the side of the trampoline, I’m suddenly awake with my legs jerking at the sudden ‘impact’ with the ground.
Sometimes my dreams like to interfere with sounds. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a dream about being in an airport and listening to the faraway sounds of a nice song on the radio, only to realize that’s my alarm playing my favourite song in an attempt to wake me up. I’ve tried changing my alarm so it instead plays a buzzer to wake me, but then I just have intense dreams about my favourite video game characters leaping into action while the buzzer notifies them of an emergency.
That’s not to say I’m doomed to oversleep. Many scientists say the human body has a ‘biological’ clock, and I think it’s this that has made me wake up from my dreams a few times. I remember a particularly fantastical dream about living in a hollowed out tree with my family, and a horde of giant bugs coming into the tree to attack us. I desperately tried to warn my mother, but she just rolled over in bed and told me, “Don’t worry. It’s almost time to wake up anyways.”
I woke up five minutes before my alarm. I don’t really understand these dreams, because they aren’t exactly lucid ones, but yet everyone in my dream always knows when I need to wake up, and when I get to a lull in my dream’s story, someone inevitably says, “Well, this is a good place to leave off.”
A type of dream I have pretty often feels like the opposite of lucid dreaming. Not really, though, as the opposite of lucid dreaming would likely be sleep paralysis, which is a very real and very creepy condition where people are trapped in nightmares and aren’t really able to move or wake up. Thankfully, I don’t have those, but I do have dreams that I think are reality for days after the dream, no matter how ridiculous the notion may be.
I remember in Grade 9 I had a major math test. I was in an advanced placement class, so I was taking Grade 10 math already. Despite that, I felt I was decent enough at math, and even if the test was a hard one, I was confident I’d walk away with a score in the high 80s or low 90s.
When I got the test back, it was a zero. I was horrified. I didn’t even know it was possible to get a score that low. Aren’t you supposed to get points for at least trying and showing some work?
I tried to hide the exam from my classmates, who always liked to compare their scores to mine as I was the stereotypical ‘smart kid’ in school. I was miserable the rest of the day. I didn’t even have an appetite for supper, and I had trouble sleeping.
The next morning, I was getting ready in front of the mirror while my mother was applying makeup. I realized then that I hadn’t told her about my test grade. I knew I’d probably be grounded for a year, but I knew it was best to get this over with instead of letting my guilt build up inside of me.
“Mom?” I choked out. “I have something to tell you.”
I realized right at that moment that I, in fact, had nothing to tell her, because all of my memories of that horrible test score were actually from a dream I had last night.
I’ve also had dreams about missing the bus for a ski trip, winning a spelling bee, getting kicked out of a drama club, and other bizarrely normal things. And every time, I go on with life thinking that’s what actually happened to me for hours or even days before I recall the truth.
One of the latest dreams I can remember, and the reason I wrote this article, is another one of these realistic dreams. In it, I remember getting up, getting ready for work, eating breakfast, driving all the way to the office, staring dully at my computer screen, and then getting ready to leave for work… only for my alarm to start buzzing and wake me up. I learned then that it is in fact very exhausting to pull yourself out of bed when you thought you had already lived out the whole Monday ahead of you.
I still don’t know why I get tricked by my dreams so often. Perhaps I’m just a gullible person. Perhaps my dreams are just very vivid. Maybe my real life is the dream, and all my dreams are visions of the true life I’m supposed to be leading right now, and I’ll always be trapped in this fantasy world… and that’s probably too much of an existential crisis to have on a Monday morning when I haven’t had any caffeine.
