Content warning: this piece contains some (pretty hawt) sexual imagery.
I can’t describe how intrusive my dreams are. I remember my dreams every. single. night. They permeate the day and trick me into thinking that the screaming match I had, or the person who was trying to kill me, or that shit I took in the middle of a board meeting, was real. I carry the guilt and feel the pain as if these events had actually taken place.
I feel emotions much stronger in my dreams than I do in waking life. Often I’ve had dreams where I feel an intense maternal love for a child – sometimes my own, sometimes not – and I wake up missing this fictitious baby, aching for her to be real. My dream anger is an all-encompassing wrath, yet it never seems to affect those I am shrieking at, who just shrug me off and appear impenetrable. I wake feeling powerless and defeated. I grind my teeth, clench my entire body so tightly that I ache all over in the morning.
My dreams, by and large, wreck me. I would pay a lot of money for a dreamless sleep, but aside from being broke as shit, I don’t like taking sleeping meds. I haven’t found a solution yet. Clearly.
Once in a while, however, I will have a dream which is so interesting or entertaining – for me, and for other people – that I feel a rare wave of gratitude for my mangled mind. Some of these dreams have been deeply introspective. Some have been downright trippy. The next two are both of these things.
The first time I met myself.
In this dream, I was in the bath with a woman. I felt embarrassed because I didn’t know how I’d come to be in this situation, and I didn’t know the woman. We were sitting with our knees spread wide, facing one another. Vagina to vagina. When I eventually looked her in the face, I discovered it was me. I was having a bath with myself. My instant reaction was to make a joke. My brain scrambled through the following:
How should I make this less awkward?- I should make a joke. But what if she doesn’t find it funny?- She will, because she is me - If I’m making the joke, then the other me should laugh - But what if I’m trying too hard to impress her? - Surely she’ll know that I am trying to make things less awkward, and so she – if she is truly me – will laugh out of politeness. But then what is the point? Just be yourself - Fuck it, I’m gonna make the joke.
If only I could remember my joke, but I suppose it doesn’t really matter what I said. I was looking for her/my reaction, and she – I – knew already the above sequence of thoughts. And as the lame quip fell from my mouth she/I pulled a face, like why do you always have to be such a loser?
I woke up.
The second time I met myself.
This encounter was much more recent, and much more physical. A lot of my dreams have this theme where I am super horny, and I am trying to find a place to jerk off, but I am always interrupted. Or caught. What’s that about?
I was in a swimming pool changing room, where I was fooling around with someone who suddenly disappeared. I was still very turned on, so I had to find somewhere to finish myself off. As I wandered around the changing rooms, I noticed an old man following me. I really wanted him to go away before I continued but I was going to EXPLODE, so I slipped (literally) into the next changing room I could find. In there I found that a body had been slung over the door like some old clothes, and this body belonged to me. It was my body. But I was still in my body. But this body had a penis. And it looked delicious. I knelt down and started sucking on my (?) own dick, and it felt amazing. Like a-mazing. I woke up, and had to jerk off for real.
When I woke up from both of these dreams I was astounded – by my own brain. I was like, brain what the heck! Normally my head is so full of anxiety that my dreams end up being super detailed work dreams, or relationship dreams, but these two! What do they mean? Does it even matter?
Maybe they mean I’m a narcissist, a horny narcissist – a sexually frustrated horny narcissist. Maybe they mean I hate myself. Or that I’m afraid I will always be alone so might as well get used to my own company. That I’m not funny. That I’m attracted to women? (I’ve tried – if only). That I think I’m the only one that matters. That I don’t matter at all? Or maybe it’s just a very particular expression of self-love.
By Rachel Smith
Illustration by Rachel Smith & Laken Sylvander
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