This will be an experimental post, delving into a very personal area I rarely share.  It’s been suggested I keep a dream journal, just for my own private purposes, but I’m going to go out on a precarious limb and see where it takes me.  Follow along if you dare!  Don’t worry, I’ve censored out any graphic material, and I won’t do this very often.

I have two realities.  A waking one and a sleeping one.  The latter is becoming more real than the former.  In it, my ghosts and demons are duking it out to reconcile my sordid past.

Here’s the weird thing: I can prompt my subconscious mind to focus on a specific unresolved issue from my past, and my dreams will process that theme all night.  If I wake up and go back to sleep, it transitions into a next episode or version.  It’s surreal and lucid at the same time.  It’s with me for days.

It’s not just a fantasy playing out; the “archetypes” (as I call them) that keep showing up represent significant, troubling people in my life who refuse to recede into the past, and my lack of closure.  Some of these people are dead in real life, some are still alive, but they all continue to obsess or oppress or haunt me.

The backdrops typically depict my childhood home and conflicts with my family.  There are complex labyrinths and often unmanageable chaos, a feeling of lostness or unsettledness.  In most dreams, I know I’m secretly older, but I appear younger, like an imposter, like I actually feel.  My interactions are with mostly young peers, and are all over the spectrum.  The attachments formed are very intense yet ephemeral.

But certain authentic archetypes constantly reappear in confusing, fluctuating roles with me.  I’m always torn between resigning myself to a false security, or putting the past behind me.  In a new twist last night, I found the courage to stand my ground and resist submission to an old nemesis.  In this version, I was even able to take the young son archetype and other innocents with me.  We were all scared, but they trusted me.  My longtime adversary was revealed for what he was and outmaneuvered once and for all.

I’m still haunted in and outside of my dreams by one friend who died without my knowing, because I had distanced myself from that old life.  There’s nothing different I could or would have done, but every so often it hits me again, how final it is.  I rarely cry, but whenever this one unlikely ghost comes around, I find myself unexpectedly brokenhearted.  I dream obsessively about somehow reconnecting and making things right, an impossibility.  It turns out, most of that family died, one after another, until maybe one sibling is left that I know of.  It makes me so sad, to think of people I knew just disappearing forever, with no real legacy.

Some days I feel like I’m fading into this other parallel world, and wonder if anyone will notice I’m gone.

If any of this resonates with you, then I have company in my labyrinthian wasteland.  If it’s too weird, then we’ll get back to doggy, gardeny stuff shortly, I assure you.

Well, here goes.