Who says you're awake?

I have pretty vivid dreams, it comes and goes of course, but pretty much since childhood I've had pretty detailed dreams.

I don't think I'm unique in that way, I feel most people have a pretty imaginative night life. I guess the thing that does make my experience difference is the level in which I retain the events and happenings of my dreams.

I have a lot of reoccurring dreams, not reoccurring in the since that it's the same things happening with the same players, more I keep visiting the same places. I've gone to some the same places so often, that I'm fairly certain I could build a map at this point. And like in most dreams, time doesn't really exist, at least not in a linear sense. I've visited a few spots throughout a centuries of time.

For example, here's a dream I had last night.

___________________________________

We're out in the middle of nowhere, somewhere on the plains. 

We're at a run down gas station, I think it's one I've been to before when it was up and operational but it's not now and hasn't been for a while. Everything's pretty dusty, dry, and bleak. For some reason I go inside to use the bathroom.

I walk straight into the main building of the gas station, there are no doors. When I go down a short hallway the room opens up into a relatively nice bathroom, nice considering. it's still the same dull tan color as everything else, but the it's tiled and somewhat lit. 

I reach down to see there's still paper on the dispenser but when I reach for it, it rolls independently and I get the sudden feeling the movement is supernatural. I leave and when I do I notice an entrance to a room I hadn't seen before, a tan dark haired man lays in a cot and locks eyes with me. I panic. Run outside to my friends and try to warn them. We're not supposed to be here. 

I'm guessing this place had become a hide-out 

Slowly more and more men come out of the wood works. They look asian, or more likely Vietnamese but their skin is dark, baked by the sun, and their hair is matted in sweat. They wear dirty polo shirts and kakis, crappy sandals and 80's band tees. They have AKs and wife beaters.

All of our things are laid out and I know that they won't be giving any of it back. My laptop is there and suddenly I realize that I haven't backed up the files, everything I've been working on for the past couple of years is only stored on this laptop. I cry. I know they won't care, about some design kids posters, but it means a lot to me. They even have my favorite sketch book and I know that none of it is coming back with me. I'm pretty upset. 

[ this part above has particular meaning being that, I'm sorry to say, this is the current state of my files. Pretty much most of the good things I've produced from my four years in school are stored on my laptop and ONLY my laptop. It is a great source of anxiety for me and this dream has prompted me to actually do something about it. I just think it's funny that I basically manifested the VC to terrify myself into being responsible ] 

I say fuck it and grab my sketch book in the heat of the moment then make a mad dash for my motorcycle. We had been on a cross country trip and my bike shows it, it's beat up and the paint is worn down so thin the metal shows in lots of places. It looks almost cell shaded. I drive and leave everything behind in dust and commotion. When I hit the highway everything changes. 

I'm in a huge vacant house, almost a manner but not quite victorian. Probably an old plantation house, everything's wood and molded. I've got a doll with me, she's old and her dress is a little tattered but she looks fancy regardless. I keep talking to her as we slowly walk through rooms, I forget exactly what I say but everything seems to be about comforting her. I'm crazy right now, for this moment I'm crazy. 

While walking through rooms I lose the doll like you do in dreams, one second it's there and important then the next it's gone and you're not bothered at all. Now I'm holding a crude teddy bear, small enough to fit in my hand and with no articulation. He's more like a teddy pillow, with a bit a red string around his neck. I fade from that dream and wake up in another, still holding the small bear. 

I'm laying in a small twin bed, everything's fuzzy but my sight is coming back and the bear is in my hand. I get up groggily and move from the child's room were I was sleeping out into the crowded and busy hallway of a very small house // apartment. 

I can't tell which. 

A black woman in her late forties or fifties is coming out of the bathroom and very zenfully corralling her ten children. All of them little girls with their hair done the same, braided in balls like strings of pearls, with red bands. They all have wide, white toothy smiles and keep looking at me pleasantly curious. 

There's one little boy and he seems to be barely keeping himself from being trampled. When I ask what's going on the women tells me without looking at me that I must have had a seizure. She had found me passed out on the road with my bike and had brought me here to her place. Now we had to get ready to leave. 

Then I wake up.  

________________________


So it's kinda stuff like that.

I think having this level of detail and interaction in my dreams, kinda makes me disconnected at times. When things in your dreams are just as real and frequent as the every day happenings that are supposedly "reality" it makes you question that reality that much more.

Sometimes I think both are dreams, or both are realities. The only thing separating them is a difference of rules and thus our own difference in perspective.

But I could be wrong.