22. 2026-08-23 / index

Dreams are really scary... Ha ha, I guess I should be calling them nightmares. It's just we don't actually have much of any dreams besides the scary ones. And yeah, some of them have recurring motifs, but... Sorry. Dreams are really scary.

I think it's the combination of how experiential they are, and how ill-prepared I feel to handle whatever's actually happening. Most of our dreams are really outlandish... stuff that could happen in real life, but just doesn't, you know? I don't know how to deal with a creepy middle-aged guy pointing a pistol through my window screen, offering I reconsider asking him to ask his kids to not tear up my garbage bags, and maybe I shouldn't have trespassed or let the dog shit on his yard or whatever, earlier. I don't know how to deal with a bunch of out-of-nowhere teenagers who've surrounded the house and decided to throw a party, and there's something not safe about staying inside but clearly outside can't be better, and no one else is freaking out... I don't know how to deal with rescuing the poor actually-tiny baby whale out of the awful contraption who's key to escaping this sinking ship, only everyone else has given up too so I scream at one of them and she screams at the next and he scraems too, and he makes it work, and the animal goes free, only the plot's all changed and I flicked a light switch and the door to outside got open, and it's a crazy storm, and my old dog barrels out and I have to get him to pee on the deck, but he's terrified and the water is choppy and we're SO close to it and hold on, it's been months, he's dead. I mean, I guess I do know how to deal with that once, once I wake up. I'm sad. But at least I saw and heard him again...

I think almost all our dreams are total rehashes of whatever's been going busy in our mind recently, all the stuff we don't think about enough during the day for us to file off as "yeah, totally processed, no worries at all". Then it gets jumbled up with a lot of stupid real-life fears and anxieties, that actually aren't stupid just irrelevant, but they feel a lot more relevant when they're acting all out, right in front of you. And a lot of it really sucks, but they also give access to... I don't know, just sensations that we can't really find again, otherwise. Obviously our bigger dog there, RIP. But also just a lot of mashed together locations and scenarios that I don't know if we're going to ever quite run into again, again like that, like any of the ingredients that make up the dream, as they actually were. I don't want to throw any of that out, I really don't want to hate our dreams for what they are. But it's so hard to imagine they'll ever be much different...

Honestly, scary dreams are probably like 10 or 15% the reason we're a system in the first place. It's sure easier to fall asleep at night when you're not facing the worst of the worst on your own. We wake up terrified, like nothing in real life could seriously be that scary, so hey... at least we survived another crazy dream journey... but stuff in real life is that scary. It's just almost all abstracted so far away from us.

I feel like between all of it we don't get a lot of freebies. There's... there's a lot that does not give us freebies! Usually I can't change any of it!

But I don't know. Screw it, too, right. Face it later? We have work today, so we're going to go work, and after that I can be a helpless crying girl with a lot of really painful bones and sleep for another four days, until Coral wakes the rest of us out of it, and I guess I'll still be here the next time they need me. Or I need them. Or somethin'.