Last night I had some extremely stressful dreams. The situations in the dream were all pure fiction, but I was dreaming about some of the touchiest, most emotionally challenging issues in my life and it really stressed me out. The dreams even woke me up several times with my heart racing and my reflexes primed for quick action.
These dreams have definitely thrown my morning off-balance as my mind and body struggle to accept the fact that these were dreams, not reality, and thus I can go about my regular day unimpeded.
I can certainly appreciate that dreams might help the brain sort through memories and mental challenges in a way that I don’t understand, but it is somewhat strange to me that they are so hard to shake off after I’ve woken up.
It’s not uncommon for me to have a dream in which I get very mad at someone in the dream. Often that person is someone I know in real life, and during the course of my dream, that person offends me terribly with their actions or misdeeds (within my dream).
The emotions of anger that I experience in my dreams is, at times, so real, so vehement and so palpable that even when I wake in the morning, I am still mad at the person.
Rationally speaking, I know that the person in my dream has done no wrong and that it’s only a dream, but in my heart (in my emotions) it’s a struggle to get over that anger.
Anyone else ever experience this?
@ Liam
So you’re one of those people! I was once upbraided by someone for not sufficiently appreciating the efforts they had put in, in a dream, to build a building they thought I’d enjoy. Now, I recognize that the creation of a dream building might be a lot of effort for a dream builder, and I can’t say why Dream Conall was insufficiently appreciative. Nevertheless, it seemed a bit much that real Conall has to pay the price for Dream Conall’s behavior.
I write software for a living, and every once in a while I dream in code. It happens especially if I’m sick and delirious. Its far worse than a nightmare. I once tried to encapsulate myself in two for loops because that, I thought, was the only way to solve the problem of sleep. Its crazy! I wake up and try to convince myself that I don’t need to worry about the code involved with sleep, I just need to sleep. I thought I might be crazy, but I’ve looked it up. It is apparently very common among full time programmers. So I feel better.
Darn it! This happened again! Why does it always have to happen on a Monday?
Strangely, yet again the dream had nothing to do with the items on my docket for the week, so it is not like I was dream-stressing about them.