Triggers

I’m trying to figure out if I have some sort of trigger to these dreams. It’s not like I just close my eyes and I’m immediately standing in a room with a real person, peeping on their dirty secrets like the neighborhood perv. I dream “normal.” I dream normal all the time. But sometimes partway through, they just…I don’t know. They change.

It’s like I’m just walking along in LaLa Land minding my own business, probably with bear feet or something (bear like the animal, not bare as in naked, because it’s a dream and you know how it is), and I step through a door, then – surprise! – I’m watching some MILF pucker up in a mirror so she can paint her lips hooker red while her kid’s pulling all the toilet paper off the roll behind her.

That’s if I’m lucky enough to even get a door. Walking through a door’s almost like stepping through some sort of barrier, a divider between my imagination and someone else’s life. That doesn’t happen very often. It’s usually more abrupt, like I just blink and I’m somewhere else, and I’m awake even though I’m still asleep. I feel awake, anyway. The nights where I have more than one vision, those suck. When I wake up I don’t feel like I’ve slept at all. I mean, my body isn’t tired, but I’m exhausted mentally, and I can’t just go back to sleep to recharge because sleeping wears me out more than being awake does.

A trigger, though, if I knew I had a trigger and figured out how to identify it, I think I could wake myself up. That’d be such an easy relief. See the trigger, wake up, clear my head for a minute, and go back to sleep. No visions. Just regular dreams with bear feet and no doors.

I need to find that damn trigger.