My reality-warp dream

I have a dream, if I can call it that, that I've had on and off for years. At first, it was just sort of comforting -- I'd wake up and think, oh what a nice dream. I found some relief in the dream and that was it. Now, like last night, once in a while I wake up not so much remembering a dream, but just kind of confused about reality, about what I've actually spent my time doing in my life. And generally I am very, very grounded and in touch with reality. So this is very strange for me, and a little disturbing.

This series of recurring dreams is about going back to college, my old college, as an adult. I'd say I started having these dreams in my late twenties. And I always loved these dreams. I always felt great relief in the dream -- it was always like liberating myself of a burden, leaving the nasty "real world" behind and going back to the cocoon of the small liberal arts college. Nothing to do but learn, eat, go to the gym, hang out with people. No pressures about success or other nasty real-world concerns about rent, insurance, promotions, dates, etc. Lovely. There were many variants of this dream, but they always pretty much cheered me up. I think I felt they provided some perspective on life, what I find difficult and challenging in life, that sort of thing.

But now, once or twice a year, I wake up not so much remembering a dream about going back to Reed College, but instead I wake up somehow being convinced that I actually did go back to college for a full year, as an adult. Like, I don't know, in my late twenties, early thirties? I actually wake up as if I was remembering a real period in my life, a whole year or nine months or whatever. So it's not a moment-in-time kind of dream like most of them seem to be. It's like a crazy upheaval of my own real-world memories. It's one of the strangest sensations I've ever had. (And I have had some strange sensations back when I had bad habits!)

What's really weird is that on waking up, it takes me a long time to sort out reality. Even though I have had this weird dream (if a dream it is) before, it took me a good half hour this morning to convince myself that no, I never went back to college as an adult. I had to kind of walk through all the periods of adult life and convince myself that no, I never took a year and went back to Reed College. Even now, as I'm typing this, there's a part of me that doesn't really believe it, that wants to sort through every year of my life and make really-really sure that there isn't some 'lost year' there when I went back to Portland Oregon to escape the real world and think some more.

I have been sleeping a ton since I got to buenos aires, and I might be a little sick too, so maybe that has something to do with it. My dreams are always more intense when I find myself in a new country, and also when I'm sick. But this dream is weird in a different way, in its very nature, like it's affecting a different part of my brain or something. Maybe because this recurring dream has happened so many times, I'm sort of dreaming about the old dreams, as if I were dreaming about real experiences that I had had. And so the subject matter of the dream seems like reality.

Freaky, huh? I don't like it, it does make me feel less grounded, but it's an interesting experience, lord knows, and we should savor our interesting experiences, right? So let's just say this -- dreams, and brains, are just fucking amazing.