Your dream. My nightmare

Heat of the Night by Bryan Adams – Listen to it.

I haven’t put it up to a vote but in general discussions over the years, I think it is safe to assume that the average person would choose a dream over a nightmare. They go to sleep at night hoping to dream of a loved one, a missing piece of their heart, or that joyful day at the beach. They want the fantasy blurred lights of a fair in the back drop view of a Ferris wheel. They want the hope of a future where they dream of their kids or a huge house with a white picket fence and wrap around porch.

No one wants to be caught in a nightmare of confusion, of fear. They don’t want to be stricken with terror as they run away from a man with no face or to be locked in a room unable to get out. They don’t want to dream of monsters, ghouls, they don’t want to wake up feeling like something supernatural is still lurking in the shadowed corners of their bedroom but they are too frozen to turn on the lamp.

“I was caught in the crossfire of a silent scream

Where one man’s nightmare is another man’s dream”

But what if your dream is my nightmare?

When I wake up from a nightmare my adrenaline is in over drive. My fear leaves me breathless and searching for the ending. My brain, my emotions, my soul is forced to search for answers where I thought there were none and I fight to go back to sleep to finish the puzzle. I am forced to face the darkness that I carry with me and I am just slightly lighter with my step the next day. I am unable to bury myself within a facade of deception that I veil over myself. I am me in those nightmares.

Nightmares are raw. Unfiltered. You no longer get to wrap yourself in life’s bubble wrap of lying to yourself and covering it up with homemade cookies and a fake smile. You are no longer telling someone, anyone, yourself, what they want to hear and pretending that you are okay. Even the narcissist cannot lie in a nightmare. The devil holds no mask. It is perhaps, possibly, the most real versions of ourselves….the most real and raw moment of our actual fears, strengths, insecurities, and feelings. We cannot lie for it is not our words that are being spoken.

If you want to really know a man, have him share not his dreams, but his nightmares. He will hesitate, I am sure of it.

I would rather be woken from a dream than a nightmare. Let me sleep. Give me the chance to find peace at the end of a private showing of my own tragedy and heavy heart. Let me fight to be one step closer to sorting out some unconscious disturbance of my soul.

When you wake up from a dream, are you really ever truly happy? Does it stay with you lingering throughout the day, the week…this joy that you found while dreaming of someone you miss? No. Or perhaps that is just me and another reason I differ so greatly from most around me.

Dreams give you false sensations of reality. They leave you longing when you wake up for something you had or something you’ll never have. It is peace you find within the dream but turmoil when you wake.

Let me have my nightmares while I sleep. You can keep your dreams.

I would rather have the dream when I wake instead of your demons during the day.