One of my most annoying symptoms of my Mental Illness is that I have such vivid, negative, yet believable dreams that I have spent a lot of my life trying to sort out dream trauma from actual trauma. This combined with the fact that unlike the average person, I not only remember dreams but can recall them in great detail weeks, months, sometimes years later, has been a great source of stress on not just me but anyone I’ve come in contact with.
I can be upset by something that someone said or did to me in a dream for a very long time before I finally say something that causes me to realize that it was not an actual event but a dream. There are many things that I have been told never happened to me (by people I believe) that to this day my body reacts viscerally as if it were an absolute certainty that it happened in real life.
Following a recent medication change however, I have had some rather interesting experiences that have changed the way I need to look at how I judge my mental status.
Two days after my medication change I had a dream about my friend going on a cruise ship that was sinking because it was somehow watertight and was going to capsize as it sunk and she wanted to dance with her boyfriend on the ceiling while wearing a very fluffy white wedding dress, and also because there was going to be lots of chocolate on the ship. The whole time I was afraid that she was going to not be safe but she said it would be fine and sure enough it turned out okay.
When I awoke from this dream I was more disturbed than any dream in which I’d received personal abuse from loved ones. I was confused and upset and quite sure that the medication had made things worse and not better. My brain could not make head nor tail of what was going on it just said “THAT MADE NO SENSE!!!” over and over and over again.
I spoke with my friend and described the dream to her and instead of saying the expected “Wow! That’s messed up!” she said “Wow! That sounds like something my mind would make up!”
After a bit of thought on the matter I realized that if I’ve never experienced what the average person experiences in the way of dreams or emotions, how would I ever know if I got there? I’m pretty sure there is a quote somewhere by some famous person that said something about if you don’t know the destination you won’t know when you get there.
Methinks it is time to ask some different questions…
~Elena <3
