Sweet Nightmares

I love sleeping because I like dreaming. When I dream, it is like I’m in another world where I could think and do anything I want without hearing the petty remarks of others. When I was a child, I constantly dreamt about a monster who was chasing me then the only way to escape it was to run and to fly but it was so embarrassing and frightening at the same time when I couldn’t actually run properly. It was as if my shoes were so much heavy that I can’t lift them up so I frequently had to wake up before the monster got the chance to grasp me. I couldn’t control my dreams during that time but now, I definitely could. I don’t know why and how but I just noticed that it was like I already have the power to control myself during my dream. I could also manipulate them sometimes. I could choose the place, the persons to be involved and even the story itself. What I want to happen in reality could instantly come true in my dreams. It is so cool yet it feels real. Every so often, I thought it would be so much better to be in my dreams than to be here in the actual world where affliction and failure exist.

Nightmares. Religious people say that nightmares occur when you didn’t pray at night. Doctors say that there could be something wrong in the pancreas during sleep and that it could happen when the person had slept after too much eating. On the contrary, my grandmother says that it could occur if you have a hungry stomach. According to her theory, during sleep your soul will wander in the kitchen and then you’ll end up being trapped inside a casserole from eating the food inside it so since then, I have been afraid to eat with a famished stomach. Who would want to die inside a casserole anyway? There’s no harm in believing. Moreover, I learned in a film that nightmares transpire during REM sleep when our muscles are so relaxed that we’re almost paralyzed. However, it was confusing for me to understand the results in an experiment wherein those people who undergone REM sleep had written negative responses compared to those who went through non-REM sleep who had positive responses. It was also said that sophisticated dreams occur during REM sleep where we could remember them clearly after sleep. So, because during that stage the Amygdala is so active where unpleasant emotions are expressed often times, does that mean that negative dreams occur only during REM sleep and that positive dreams happen only during non-REM sleep like what the experiment had shown? Are good and bad dreams limited according to the stage we’re going through during sleep? If it is, then most of my dreams about someone I love dearly were just nightmares because they were so detailed and I could remember them after sleep which meant that they happened during REM sleep.

Anyway, according to a dream scientist, dreams don’t necessarily have certain meaning and interpretation because they are relative to different customs which may vary through time depending on the culture where the dreamer belongs. Conversely, I remembered a story in the Bible about Joseph who was used by God to interpret dreams and his interpretations were actually true. Dreams were God’s way to speak to people during those times so in my opinion as a Christian, maybe there are still some specific dreams which God uses to show and say something to us. Maybe, just maybe, they are one of His creative ways to talk with us and to manifest His power to us.

In my conclusion, I believe that there’s nothing wrong in giving interpretations and meanings to our dreams. Most of the time, they bring cheerfulness to our glum faces. They give us hope to pursue something we are dreaming of. They act as a warning to stop us from doing bad things. They are fantasies worth imagining. Yet, just be careful because the worst thing is that generally they turn into traitors. Dreams are magical but we can never deny the fact that magic is just an illusion, a deceptive scheme to make us believe in something that will never come true in reality, and the nightmare that steals our breath in every second while gasping for air from the luscious moments that will soon turn out to be infeasible.

~darkangel~