Maybe Freud was on to Something

Rarely do I ever remember if I had a dream during the night and even rarer do I actually remember my dreams, but when I do they are often so vivid that they can quite easily have an influential effect on my day. I've been lucky enough to wake up some mornings feeling whole, fulfilled, and elated as I let the undeiably powerful and positive imagry of my dreams consume me. But then there are also the days where I wake up ready to kill, wanting to explode, and teeming with hate. Those are the days I have nightmares. One of those days was last night.

My nightmare was one of the worst I've had in quite some time. Waking up sweaty, in a panic, and physically overcome with anger and frustration is not a good way to start off the day, if you ask me. My dream very closely mimicked reality--my everyday reality--only slightly changing some of the details, changing them just enough to hurt me, to make me feel as though I was a toy, to make me feel hated. In my dream I was nothing more than a tool being used by those around me, by one of the people I most care about in my life, and my being used brought joy to this person. My torture was this person's pleasure.

I couldn't shrug off the feelings when I awoke and I was extremely angry at the real life version of the person that was manifested in my dream. I can undoubtedly say that when I woke up I hated that person with everything in me at the time. Slowly as I realized it was only a dream, the hate started to fade, but it's still there nonetheless, just diminished. Feeling this rage that was created by a dream did, however, show me things about how I view that person, as well as other people because I'd never really given into feeling that way about people before. Only could my subconscious rouse such feelings and in doing so, it showed me things I needed to see.

There is still lingering feelings of animosity swirling around inside of me hours after I've woken up. How amazing is it that my subconscious could stir up such feelings inside of me, feelings associated with real-life people, with a clever rearrangement of what I viewed as reality and showing it to me while I sleeped? It's unbelievably amazing.