17/10/26 - Perhaps "nightmare" is too strong a term for it...
Anyway, yesterday - with about thirty minutes to go of my shift - I fucked something up at work. I don't often fuck up, at least not badly, I guess because I've been there for a long time. But I've been anxious recently - everybody around me seems to be growing tumours and getting cancers, and this year has given me multiple horrid things after another so far - and this came through in my dream. (Incidentally, I was worried that I'd dream about my work fuck-up, which has been weighing on my mind, and I keep having this horrid image of being hauled in to my boss and forced to explain myself and then being sacked, which won't happen because I have coworkers, both in my branch and others, who I know have fucked up worse, and they've not been sacked. But anyway).
I didn't dream about my work fuckup. I dreamt that I was in a locked room with twelve or so other people, and the only way for us to get out was to kill each other - I rewatched the first Hunger Games movie recently, so I guess that was what caused it. Anyway, none of us wanted to be the first to attack, so we all sat quietly and perfectly still. And then one guy jumped up and started rattling the bars of the cage, so ferociously that they bent under the force of his movement, and we were all able to escape. I ran in the opposite direction to the others, down this long corridor that seemed to stretch on and on until I ended up in my bathroom. As in, the bathroom of my house. The bath was full - and to be fair, I had taken a long hot bath before bed to try and calm myself - and inside it was my phone. Gasping, I reached for it. The screen lit up. I had hundreds of notifications from various people, including friends I haven't spoken to for years. Also, my phone apparently had lots of viruses on it. I took the charging port of the phone into my mouth and sucked the water out of it, and then I did the same to the headphone jack, and then I realised that this couldn't be my phone, because my phone doesn't have a headphone jack.
And then I woke up. Not entirely a nightmare - but anxiety-inducing nonetheless. Thanks, anxiety.
20/2/26 - Been having strange dreams for the last few nights, each varying in intensity. The thing is, they're all lucid dreams. That might be good in some respects, but in many it isn't, because they are nightmares of my own making that I cannot break free from. For example, a few nights ago, I had a dream where I was assaulted on a train. Whilst the man was on top of me, my lungs seized up and I couldn't breathe. I knew I was dreaming. I knew it wasn't real. But it felt real and when I woke up, my lungs were pressed, like I'd been broken on the wheel.
But last night was okay. I dreamt I was at an open-air street food market in Bangkok, buying an aloe juice drink for 10 baht.
23/02/26 - And I wish it had been, because this was horrid, I woke up with a dry mouth and a stomach squeezed. A boa around my abdomen. For some reason I could smell old, stale turmeric.
In the dream, my niece was being beaten by a man that my sister had living with her. I don't remember the man, just the cries of my niece, and I told my sister that she should be ashamed of herself, because she simply did not care. I said,
"It's lucky that John has some sense."
I have no idea who John is, or was; or rather who he is meant to represent. In the dream, my throat hurt from screaming, my cheeks swollen with tears, hot water stinging my eyes. I sat in the downstairs toilet of my parents' house, staring down at the pale terracotta tiles, pupils tracing the cracks. My mother's laundry basket was full of sodden black clothes. I was the only person to ever wear enough black to warrant an entire basket, though I did not remember doing any laundry, and besides, why would I be doing it at my mother's house?
In the bathroom, my chest constricted. I began to cry anew. Inexplicably, I was holding a blade.
And when I woke up -