my dreams

 I heard one time that we dream every night, we just don't remember some, or all, of them. I have always had weird dreams that I could remember in detail. Since I started taking antidepressants over three years ago, they have gotten more frequent and perhaps even more strange. 

For instance, I have a recurring dream where I am in either the kitchen or family room in my house. We redid these rooms in 2019 and in my dream, they look how they did before the remodel. For the first month or two that I had this dream, it was more like a nightmare. I had an intense feeling of dread because I knew I wasn't supposed to be there. It just felt wrong. After probably over a year of having this dream, I've gotten used to it. I haven't gotten to the point where I can recognize that it is a dream while I am having it, but I can go about my business as normal in the old rooms. 

I have even experienced dream inception: A dream within a dream. This has happened multiple times, the most recent being last night. This was about cheer, which happens quite frequently because I did it for nine years so it took up a lot of my time and therefore space in my brain. This time, I dreamt that I was in my old gym which closed in 2017. I was my current age, but I was with girls who were on teams with me between 2013 and 2017. We were practicing a routine that I didn't know, so I was extremely anxious about my coaches yelling at me. The next thing I know, I was out of practice and in the lobby. For whatever reason, we were having a reunion of past cheerleaders and their moms. This would be impossible for two main reasons: 1. The two coaches that owned the gym had an extraordinarily bad falling out and 2. An office moved into that space so it looks nothing like how it used to. At some point I realized that the practice I just had was a dream. I decided to tell one of my former coaches about it (different from the coaches at the practice.) This makes even less sense because I hate this coach with a burning passion, which I cannot emphasize enough. Once the conversation was over, I reminisced with a few people about a memory of a girl dancing on a table in the lobby and falling over. We all found this hilarious. I wouldn't normally find this funny, so I am unsure as to why I thought it was so comical in my dream. Plus, it never happened so I am also confused as to why I was fond of a fake memory. After that, I woke up. 

The thumbnail for a YouTube video that could have been helpful for my former coach

What this says about my psyche, I don't know. But I do think there is value in analyzing dreams. I wouldn't go as far to say as some dreams can be premonitions, however, I think that dreams can represent fears and trauma that our conscious mind either is not aware of or tries to avoid. For me, I would presume that my recurring dream about my house represents my fear of change. The fact that I have accepted the "wrongness" in this dream could mean that I have gotten better about accepting the possibility of change in my real life. Or maybe my weird dreams are the result of blunt trauma to my head from people falling on me at cheer. I'll leave it up to you.