Dreaming of Electric Sheep

I do not have dreams.

In the literal sense. Obviously, I have my delusions of grandeur, my dreams of one day having something I've written be held in high esteem by somebody with no real vested interest in my life other than I'm the cool weirdo artist they've been obsessed with for some reason. I want my farm with my goats and to never have to look at another computer again. I want to sit on the porch and play guitar and have a big ol' Mead Hall thing that acts as sort of a private club/social venue. I want to provide a space for people like me, who are bad at stuff, so we can be bad at stuff together but in a way where the, like, 2 things we're good at end up being really useful. I have THOSE kinds of dreams.

I don't have the literal dreams though. I don't fall asleep to images of melting clocks and surrealistic landscapes. My nights are not plagued by the Mares of Bosch. Which is, perhaps, more to say that I don't REMEMBER my dreams than that I don't have them. I'm told their biological imperatives, and that I absolutely must have them or else my brain wouldn't work quite right otherwise. Which, oh wait, but not like that. Probably. Maybe. After all, who can speak to the nature of other people's dreams with anything other than assumed authority?

This gives my existence something of an odd rhythm. I literally kind of just blink and time jumps forward. I start to get sleepy, and then it's sort of like a... conscious choice to fall asleep. Not always. If I stay awake too long, I *will* fall asleep. But falling asleep is usually as easy, for me, as "Okay, now I'm going to sleep. Goodnight!" and then I'm gone. I have zero issues falling asleep and I can do it anywhere.

Then I wake up, and I'm usually raring to go. Tired, maybe, but I feel tired in the eyes more than anything. My eyes will burn and water and force themselves closed in a very physical "No, I know Brain says go. Body says sleep now." sort of reaction that gets more and more difficult to fight against. And why would I really want to? It's not like being awake has ever done anybody any favors.

Since I have so many nights of simply nothing, I remember the three dreams that I can recall vividly. One is about the movie "Small Soldier" where my toys come to life. This dream was mostly a fun one, but the stakes were real enough. The toys came to life, which means they also came to death. But overall it was mostly fun. The second is where I was Mario and kept falling to my death in lava. This was a nightmare, and I woke up having fallen out of bed and screaming. The third is being shot in the neck during a drive-by. This one was the single most terrifying thing I've ever experienced and is more "sleep paralysis" than it was dream. And I guess there's a fourth one that's vague about being chased through a cornfield by a monster. So not 3, but 4 dreams.

I don't have these dreams every night or anything. I've had each of these dreams exactly once, and they stuck with me because I don't remember my dreams. So they stood out as being entirely odd and unique experiences that I cannot really recreate. The closest I can come to is that if I hold myself in a pre-sleep, meditative state... I can imagine stuff in a way that I can't quite manage when I'm fully conscious. But they're lucid, and I'm not actually asleep when its happening. I engage with this space quite frequently, because it's where I can be... I don't know. Free. I guess. It's essentially just a mind palace, but in order to fully access it I have to be half-asleep. It's where I work on my life problems, do my deep probes into who I am as a person, and essentially dream. But it's not dreams. It's more of a meditation.

So the idea of dreaming on a regularly basis is a concept that is somewhat foreign to me. The concept of lucid dreaming is one that is, more or less, identical to whatever the hell you want to call that meditative state (it's not a proper meditation either). But it's also profoundly different, because that is *not* a dreamscape. It's me walking through the hallways and dormitories of my mind, and it sure as shit is not restful. It's easily one of the more exhausting things activities I find myself engaging in, but it's also one of the more productive and worthwhile. Sort of. It's a major part of the process that gives you *gestures broadly* this. However you feel about that.

And, conversely, this idea of being conscious almost seemingly constantly must be something of an oddity for you as well. I blink, and then it is morning (or it is not and I wake up in the middle of the night for some reason, but let's not lose the forest for the trees). I'm just sort of... always awake, as far as I'm concerned. Time passes, the body sleeps, and allegedly I dream and store my memories and process things in the same that everybody else does. But what the fuck am I doing that whole time? Where do I go? What does my brain occupy itself with? Is it the same as everybody else's, but I just happen to have a *very* strong sense of what is and is not worth remembering and thus simply don't care about my own dreams? Do I allow myself to be inspired by them, at least? What's even happening in there?

I'm just... constantly awake and aware. Except for this significant period of daily time that doesn't even afford me the comfort of dreams, and I even kind of look forward to that time because hoo-boy-howdy do I enjoy not being aware. It's like being dead, I guess. I just don't exist, and thus whatever the world is doing is not my problem. But it's also just wasted time that could be spent doing literally anything else. I don't even get the benefit of dreams. The only value in it is that it repairs my core biological systems, near as I can tell.

And thus is my relationship with dreams an odd one. I find them curious and fascinating, largely because I am not afforded the opportunity to experience them myself. They aren't really things that happen to me. But also I find it very, very difficult to put meaning and stock into the nature of dreams, because I also don't have them. So how important can they really be, amirite? But also, hey. Maybe that just means I don't have access to certain types of magic, and that's okay too. I've got my own things.