Pillow Talk

Sometimes you wake up and everything is just still. You have to work out what's real and what is just you complicating your life. You remember what happened and what was just a dream.

Other days it's not that simple. And it takes hours or maybe even the whole day to get to the point that you realize what is real and what is just your mind messing with you. But its painful...because dreams become so vivid that when you come back to reality, you've lost something...you have to realize those experiences didn't happen, those emotions weren't real. You wake up battered and exhausted from the dragons you've fought and the bridges you couldn't stop from burning, and reality smashes in and tells you you still have to get up and do what needs to be done.

Sometimes I think dreams are worse than reality. Then I wake up and remember who I am.

Sometimes I know it's a dream because it seems so normal, so simple....and my life isn't like that.

Sometimes I think what happens in a dream isn't out of my control...and I am responsible for my actions in them. It is so real, so emotional, and so gut-wrenching. I feel utterly aware of my circumstances...and the choices I make.

I don't know if I prefer my dreams to reality, or if it's a relief to wake up and know it didn't happen. I think I expend so much strength in my dreams that knowing it was for nothing is frustrating. I wish I got some credit for the mountains I climb in my dreams.

Then again, sometimes I wake up and want to be sick until the only thing left in my stomach is guilt from all the horrible things I did... even though it was a dream. I still did it.

It's fascinating. I don't know if I dread sleep or secretly crave it. It's seductive. Sometimes I wake up from a horrible dream and I can't help but go back to sleep...to find out if I really am that person in my dream, to see what I do....to judge.

I remember my past dreams while I spin new ones. Relationships grow. Scenery comes back from past dreams. They aren't disjointed. They are just a different level of reality.

A level that somehow works for me.

Because in my mind, the world is what I need it to be. It might be harsh. Even cruel. Or sometimes too good to be true. Usually it is two extremes mixed together. But that's something I understand. It isn't foreign to me. I know to expect the worst or the best.

Maybe I'm overwhelmed trying to find balance in reality when I am such an alien to it. Maybe my dreams are an escape, where things make sense, and I can be god and devil and somehow it works.

Who am I in real life? How am I supposed to decide that? Who can decide what traits are inherent, when every feasible characteristic ebbs and flows with time... and who I am and what I do in the moment is never consistent.

At least in my nightmares, I don't have to decide. I can be extreme and insane, and no one thinks it is strange, because that is the world I dream in.