Dreaming can be great, an escape from the real world, as you lose yourself in a comforting sleep that you don’t want to wake up from, but that’s sometimes the problem…I don’t want to wake up.
Before I begin, I want people to be aware that I know I’m one of the lucky people in the world, that has a roof over my head etc. I’m not trying to portray my life as being worse than other peoples because I am constantly aware of the many lives worse than mine, every time you walk down a street, passing the homeless, and those TV ads of people begging for a scrap of change just so they can eat.
I am lucky with how my life is, but this blog is about my mental health, and whilst it makes me feel like life is shit, I know it’s still better than many others.
So what’s wrong with dreaming? Recently I’ve been going to bed a lot later than usual. My closest friends often joke that I’m the old man of the group, mostly because I am the oldest in my group of friends, but also because I often go to bed earlier than most, with my “bed time” being between 8pm and 9pm, but for the past week I’ve been trying to avoid sleeping early for the simple fact that I don’t want to dream any longer than I need to, because in my dreams I’m happy, and when I wake up I realize that it was all just a dream.
Do you ever feel like you aren’t living, and instead you’re just merely existing? Well when I dream it feels like living and when I awake it feels like existing, and there’s a big difference.
This idea might not apply to everyone however, because for me personally, I seem to have very vivid dreams, that feel real. When I dream of the forest with the waterfall that I love so much, I can hear the water, feel it’s cold touch and the misty spray when I get closer to the fall, and then I can smell the grass and feel myself slump as I sit by a tree and just watch the wildlife. I can feel it if I get a scratch from a tree branch or bang my knee on a rock whilst clambering across the river, but that’s what I love about my dreams.
As a kid, my mum would always say that if I came home in cuts and bruises, then she knows I’ve had fun because she knows those injuries came from me climbing trees and rocks, running around having an adventure, and I miss those days. Nowadays when I go out, the only injury I might get is falling down some steps or tripping on a curb. It sounds so strange to say but I miss coming home in cuts and bruises because that to me, was living, that was adventure! So when I dream, it’s like living my childhood again but as an adult.
I wrote a poem about this, and I will share it at the bottom of this article, but before that I want to say one last thing. Dreams are often beautiful, and make people smile, but waking up each day isn’t as easy as it sounds. It’s hard to leave a dream, it’s hard to face life when you don’t feel like you’re living. It’s a struggle each morning but it’s something we must all do. We need to face life head on, and say “it might not be perfect but it’s better than what many others have.”
If we can remind ourselves, and each other of this idea, then it will hopefully become easier to face life day by day, and that’s the only way we can go through life, one day at a time, but at the end of the day, we need to dream, because I think dreams are our way of escaping, but also our way of dealing with life.
To Dream is to Suffer
I don’t want to sleep
Because I don’t want to dream
Of all the things I may never be
All the places I may never see
Dreaming is something beautiful
But when I wake up it all goes wrong
Because my life isn’t like my dream
It’s a whole different kind of song
When I dream I dream of forests
Feeling like the person I’d rather be
But when I wake back up again
I realise I’m back to being me
I want to see what’s out there
But my life is held back by a chain
A repetitive existence with low income
And the demons that gnaw at my brain
I don’t want to sleep
Because I don’t want to dream
Of the type of being I may never be
And all the places I may never see
– Connor J Sheffield