Throughout my life, I have had a very vivid dream life. For the course of several years, I would regularly have a long set of dreams where I had a mundane job that was entirely different (but equally mundane) to my real life job and that would often leave me exhausted when I woke up, having worked (it felt) all night in my sleep, even when I got up to face a day of work (and often school in addition to that). I do not even know if that would qualify as a nightmare by my own standards, as my sleep, throughout the course of my life, has provided exquisite variations of nightmares of all kinds, whether they be flashbacks to childhood (generally not a pleasant part of my life), nightmares of trauma and violence that I have not yet suffered in life but can vividly imagine in my dreams anyway, natural disasters, and the like. This is an area of my life that deeply affects me on a regular basis, but it is not one I often relish talking about.

After all, my dreams are rather personal to me. The subject matter of those dreams is often very personal to others. For example, twice this week I had dreams that woke me up (one of the dreams, at least, would qualify as a nightmare), and yet the precisely personal nature of the dream prevents me from discussing it in detail. Perhaps the details are irrelevant, as my dreamworld is so troubling that it is not necessary to recount all of the nightmares I have had about death and imprisonment and fighting and arguments, to say nothing about still weirder dreams that I have had, including one vivid dream I had as a university student that involved a family I am close friends with and cars that were driven without visible drivers. Any dream that is that spooky will probably wake me up in some degree of terror.

Those philosophers and psychologists who are prone to deal with the subconscious or the unconscious mind, which is where our dreams tend to come from, have all kinds of ideas about where dreams come from. For example, some of the nightmares I have had (including the rather personal one this past week) are post-traumatic nightmares, flashbacks to unpleasant experiences in the memory, and since I have lived a fairly traumatic life, there are a great deal of memories that can come up as the mind attempts to deal with memory through reliving it over and over and over again. On the plus side, this means that the mind uses dreams as case studies to test better ways of coping with the problems of the past (or present). On the minus side, this means that sleep is not as much a refuge and safe place as some of us might hope. Perhaps I simply need to better practice those skills that allow one to rewrite dreams, and simply guide them in a more positive direction, rather than to respond in panic and terror. Old habits die hard, though.

When I was as high school student, like many students, no doubt, I kept a dream diary for a short period of time. The dreams I recorded in that dream diary as a teenager were quite a bit more positive than the nightmares I have been recounting so far. But they were similarly exotic–my dream life has a marked bias for the unconventional and for the extremely vivid. Many of my plays, for example, are the result of dreams or daydreams I have had, where I have found the story interesting enough to flesh out a little more. By and large, whether light or dark, these works are my own attempt to wrestle with the problems of history and memory, of loneliness and love, of freedom and responsibility, of choice and fate, of loss and gain, and many other weighty and personal matters. Often my dreams and my writings have taken on greater meaning because they have (generally unintentionally) been taken to refer to other people, which makes life even more complicated.

For better or worse, I have used my writing to cope with my dream life over the course of my life. But being an extroverted thinker has meant that my dreams, by virtue of being written down and written out, have become far more public than they should be, and brought a great deal of my personal life into public scrutiny, which has probably not done me a lot a good either in my relationships with others or in the perception other people have of me. Every decision we make about how we deal with our lives involves tradeoffs, understanding that what people know about us can and will be used against us in the court of public opinion (and perhaps even in courts of law, though I have been fortunate enough to avoid that so far), but also understanding that wrestling openly with our lives will make us better and stronger and more compassionate people. We always have to weigh and balance whether it is worth it to discuss or deal with personal matters based on our own standards of privacy and those of others whom we care about.

In one sense, not even our dreams belong to us. One time I wrote a play about a recurring nightmare I had had as a child, and after I wrote the play a young lady whom I had once greatly loved and admired and had not spoken to for about a decade wrote me a rather pointed and unhappy message about her being upset about being in the dream, since she recognized that she had been written about. And her complaint was just. If our dreams reflect on other people, and mine often do, since the subjects that trouble my waking and sleeping mind are often interpersonal problems, an area of my life that is extremely vexing and frustrating to me, then to the extent that our dreams are about others, those dreams are the property of others, and not entirely our own. This makes wrestling with our dream life even more complicated than it already is.

But on the other hand, the recognition that our dreams belong to others as well as ourselves is not entirely bad. For me, it is a reminder that as isolated as I am, my dreams are something that connect me to other people, being that they are often about deeply important matters and about people who are very important to me. Given that I am a person who struggles with attachment, it is significant that it should be such a large part of my dream life. The meaning and significance of this is hard to determine, but at least it shows me to be a human being with normal longings, however hidden they may be to most eyes, and I for one will celebrate that connection with others, even if it will take a lot of work to wrestle successfully with the vivid and sometimes disturbing nature of my night visions. But as is so often the case, that work appears moderately urgent, if I want to have any kind of good sleep again, seeing as my sleep is generally very poor and very troubled.