Don't believe everything you dream.

I didn't ride home on the back of a giant dinosaur... or DID I?

Fun side effect of anti-anxiety/depressant meds. Funky. Ass. Dreams. For lack of a better descriptive term. I came across this idea for a post just five minutes ago, as I opened my fridge to grab my coffee cream and noticed a bag of four potatoes on the shelf. "Weird." I thought, "I was sure there were only two left in that bag." The answer was simple - last night, in my dreams, I must have dreamt about my refigerator, because I dreamt there were only two potatoes.

The odd thing (and I know it's the meds, because I never had this before) is that, in particular before the morning coffee, I would have a hard telling you if the dream was real life and this is a dream, or vice versa. Considering the extreme nature of many of my dreams/nightmares, that makes for a disturbing and restless morning.

I dream all night, vividly, and 90% of the dreams are what I would term as nightmares - in particular, my parents doing cruel and abusive things to me, or me witnessing them doing cruel and abusive things to each other. That's not even the beginning, however. I have people trying to kill me (often my parents but not always), drowning on a boat, sex partners strangling me, forgetting that I own two guinea pigs and not being able to find them to see if I have fed them any time in the past week (that's a recurring one), walking into a scene where a sniper just took out an entire street of people and realizing that they are all vivdly dead, and... as mentioned before, riding home on a dinosaur.

I know that to many people, it would seem unbelieveable for me to spend half my morning unable to determine whether or not some of these more traumatic scenes actually occured, but I do! It's scary, disturbing, and the family dreams always leave me feeling really fucked up. In particular because my mother is *always* her forty-five year old self in these dreams, so I can go almost a whole day forgetting that she has Alzheimers. That's not a fun thing to "realize" on a regular basis.

That being said, occasionally I have a crazy vivid dream that I wouldn't have had before my meds, because it just wouldn't have felt that real before. Sometimes, on those lucky nights, I'll have a flying dream. Or a really, really good sex dream with someone I will never have sex with but sure wish I could. It's like, every once in a while, my brain decides it's been a bit too mean recently and decides to give me a break, and a little reward.

Drinking my coffee and peeking outside for the dinosaurs,
PS