Nightmares (Day 76)

October 8, 2013 by K 4 Comments

Last night I had a dream that triggered my hypochondria. I woke up at 5:00 am and I spent the next hour in an obsessive panic. I think this was the first time I’ve ever been triggered by a dream. Not that I’m surprised that it happened. Most of my dreams are so lucid that they are practically real-life to me. Some of my dreams affect my mood for hours or maybe days after I experience them.

This particular dream was about an new invention that was made to easily test people for STIs. People were lining up to use it. The machine worked by using Facebook information (totally not logical, I know). You would enter your Facebook info into the machine’s computer and it would bring up the face of someone else who had previously entered their info-but only if they had given you an STI (a line would be drawn between your profile photo and theirs. You could use tiny handheld machines to view your results in private, so I did this. My results with a male individual came up as a positive. I remember being so angry and distraught and then I woke up.

Even though the dream was completely illogical (I have never slept with a man in my life), I woke up extremely anxious, thinking things along the lines of,  “what am I going to do?”. In my head, the dream somehow transcended into my real-life conscious and I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

The really annoying thing about the whole debacle was the fact that I didn’t have control over whether I was going to be triggered by my dream or not. I can try to control and monitor my thoughts when I’m awake but when it comes to my dreams, any thoughts are fair game.