echo By Trisha Leong
Which dreams are the worst? Having your heart hammering as you fall off a cliff, feeling the wind fail to break your fall as you see the ground getting closer and closer; being tickled till you reach the point of suffocation; feeling bound in slow motion while everyone else around you still moves normally; having your teeth fall out one by one? ..nightmares are real. They can occur during the most unsuspecting nights, regardless of whether your day was good or rough.
However, there are some dreams that may not be as dramatic as these, but manage to latch onto our minds throughout the day, eliciting a foul mood in us (that dream of sitting for an exam- the night before the exam). Sometimes they do nothing more than to irritate us, sometimes they do a really splendid job at planting fear in us. Dreams take us into a fantasy land where our longings and desires, consciously known or not, can be experienced as if it really was real. Of course, when these kinds of dreams end and we wake up returned to the actual running world, disappointment kicks in. And on the other end of the spectrum, there are those dreams from which we’re more than glad to have woken up from.
It can be difficult to imagine what it would be like to live in a world with one of the person we love truly gone. Sometimes, we don’t realize how much pain we could go through because we don’t even give much thought to these people that make the most difference in our lives. It is through dreams that we get to experience these circumstances and have our eyes opened as to how we may have been giving them less appreciation than they should be receiving. We may be baffled too at how intense our emotions are for a person as we are made aware of how much we would miss them.
Another type of world we could be encased in that greatly meddles with our feelings is that of being ignored or uncared for by the people we are often around. This could be the group of friends you’re closest to in school, your significant other, favourite cousins, or worse- all of these combined. Very few people would feel unaffected by being brushed off, particularly by those that they expect to receive priority from. Our self-esteem is easily damaged when we fall victims to treatment like this, so being encapsulated in a dream that creates such an environment surely does give us a glimpse of how much we need others to embrace our presence.
We enter another realm whenever we fall asleep. They could simply serve as a source of rest and escape from our usual thought in the real world, or they could implant in our hearts questions worth pondering over. Great realizations can occur as our minds drift away in sleep, all the more reason to not neglect sleep. So get more sleep tonight!
