Alexa Davison
Coming back from break, I’m grateful to say the time difference for me has not been excruciating. It’s only a three-hour difference, which is manageable. However, it’s still annoying enough, as it throws off sleep schedules and mealtimes. I was going to sleep at 8:30 pm and waking up around 5 am for a week straight. This means that I took quite a few naps throughout the week as I attempted to readjust. This anecdote is less about my schedule, though, and more about how active I discovered my brain was during this time. I felt so relaxed at home over break with no schoolwork to stress over, and no social obligations as I was quarantined for half of it. Coming back to school was a bit of an overload for me, and my dreams reflected it.
I want to preface this dream with something my dad told me. He watches a lot of philosophical videos and reads books to challenge ideas, and we like to share our knowledge when I’m home to discuss it with him. He said something new he learned was that we humans have so many nerve endings in our brains that are actually more active when we are asleep than when we are awake. This leads philosophers to the idea that our dreams might be a reality, and our period of being awake is all of us sharing the same dream. This absolutely blew my mind.
With that being said, I took a short nap in my dorm room during the first week of being back. It wasn’t meant to be anything special, just a quick refresher so I could continue the rest of my day. I don’t remember the beginning half of the dream, but I remember getting stuck while trying to wake up. I could open my eyes and see the color of the sleeve I was wearing and the posters on my wall, but I couldn’t bring myself to consciousness. I kept trying to close my eyes to open them again in hopes of waking up, but I was stuck. I began to panic and tried to kick my legs, but they wouldn’t move. I tried to scream, but it was silent. I was so incredibly scared and confused, and eventually gave up and closed my eyes again to drift off back to sleep, thinking that maybe that was my body’s way of telling me it wasn’t ready to get up yet.
I woke up, but I wasn’t in my dorm. I was in a basement or cellar of some kind, with concrete walls, floor, and ceiling. There were about twenty other people my age in a circle with metal chairs, but we were sitting in front of them on the floor instead of in them. There was an old man next to me with shaggy grey hair and a long beard telling us that he understood what we went through was scary and stressful. He told us that we would be offered pills as sedatives to help us relax our minds and not focus on what had happened. This scared me even more, and I leaned back into the chair behind me to bury my head in my arms in hopes of going back to sleep. I wanted to wake up in my dorm room, not this basement. The old man was laughing at me telling me it would get better, but before I could take their “sedative” I jolted awake in my own bed and dorm room.
I cannot think of any good explanation for this dream other than the possibility we might be living in the matrix or there was something else in the coffee I drank that morning. After that dream though, I’ve given a lot more thought to how we may not even be experiencing “reality” when we’re awake. The idea that our minds are not even as active awake as they are when we are asleep is so intriguing to me.
I have further given more thought to how we can quite literally create our own “reality” in our minds. We are fully in control of our emotions, reactions, and actions. It gets harder as daily tasks pile up to keep this in mind, but when I find myself slipping into a spiral, I remind myself that I am in control of my mind and can pull myself out if I choose to. Going back to what my dad had said, I wonder if my daily trials even matter that much if we are all just sharing the same dream.