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Have you ever had a dream that left you visibly shaken when you finally woke up?

A lot of the details of this one are already starting to fade, but I remember having lengthy fights with two different girls – not sure if it was romantically inclined or otherwise, but it was clearly pretty bad because at one point I left and came back, and then they were both laughing at me … I’m still not entirely sure why, but I remember in the dream that it made me very depressed.

Next I went to visit my Mom, and it was almost as if I were saying goodbye – somehow she knew everything and understood, and our exchange was surprisingly calm despite her somehow knowing what was going to happen next. Before I left I told her that I loved her, and she replied that I’d always live on in her heart.

The last thing I saw was the mental image of a handgun, and then I suddenly woke up.

…and just for the record, please don’t take this post as a cry for help or anything – I just think it’s interesting to talk about, even if the subject of something like suicide is pretty damn scary.

What I found weird about this whole dream was that even after I woke up and got in the shower, it took me a good twenty minutes to sort of calm down and remind myself that it was in fact, just a dream, and that I’d gone to sleep feeling good and that I needed to get back there because I’ve got a lot of creative work to get done today. I’ve never in real life actually considered suicide as a solution to my problems and besides, I’m far too afraid of death to ever actually go through with it. It always seemed like such a passive aggressive way of dealing with “the people who’ve wronged you,” as if whoever you’re at odds with is going to forever mourn your loss and spend the rest of their own lives wishing that they’d treated you differently.

And maybe that’s true in some cases, but assuming that my own dream maybe was about love, it’s probably a hard fetch to believe that those girls wouldn’t eventually move on and find happiness with someone else later on down the road.

The whole experience actually reminded me of a very different dream that I distinctly recall having a couple of years ago. It was during a time when Sara was both working and going through nursing school, so we didn’t really see each other a whole lot, and apparently in this dream for whatever reason I had gone back in time to before the two of us had actually met. Again, I don’t recall the actual reason – maybe it was to try a different path with another girl or something, but eventually I found myself in the same place as before – alone, and wanting to speed things up until I would actually meet my wife.

Except it didn’t happen that time around.

In real life we met on the Internet, so I bode my time until the spring of 2006 and then signed up for chemistry.com the same as before, but that fateful profile about the girl who loved dolphins never came across my screen. Something was different this time, and I waited and waited, but nothing ever happened until I eventually decided to try and hunt her down myself because I still remembered everything from our future life together – where she worked, etc…, and so I showed up one day at the school where she was teaching, but she didn’t recognize me.

And she got kinda freaked out because I sounded like a stalker, knowing all of these intimate details about her while she’d never seen me before in her life!

I woke up from that dream as well pretty shook up, and I found myself wanting to talk to her right away (she was working nights, so she wasn’t home) just to make sure that she still knew who I was! Admittedly I don’t know a lot about dreams – where they come from, and how your brain draws on past and fictional experiences … it’s not like I’d watched Back to the Future before going to bed or anything, so who knows where the concept actually came from in the first place.

I really don’t have a good way to end this post, so I’m just going to stop now and go work on some other stuff. I do feel a lot better now that a couple of hours have passed and I’ve aired some of it here as well. Besides, it’s not like we can really do anything about the dreams that we have anyways … when I was a kid, I used to imagine that I could and I would press different “imaginary buttons” on the side of my bed if I wanted to dream about Mega Man or Super Mario Bros. that particular night, but as far as I can recall, the buttons never actually worked.

And even if they did, I’m pretty certain that as an adult I wouldn’t exactly have buttons for breakup suicide or time travel relationship disaster, anyways! They’d likely be much more perverted buttons, which I’m not going to go into any further detail about here…  8)