Dream Land

I'm writing this, Gentle Reader, in the hope that anyone reading this will also have some insight and would like to comment.  I have unusual dreams.  I am not going to bore you terribly with details as I know how, yawn, entertaining listening to other people's verbal novelizations of their dreams can be.  To give a little heads up, my doctor recently offered me medication to suppress the dreams as she, wrongly, assumed they were disturbing me.  In a way, they do disturb me.  And I don't want them to stop.

Here is what happens when I dream.  I find myself in a different place with people I have never met before.  Some of them I meet again in later dreams. Things are often very similar to the way they are in daily life, just more intense and often with a strong sense of art and a creative bohemian ambience.  I also never feel as though I am in a dream, but that I am awake and spending time with people I do not know in my waking life.  At times I meet the same people in other dreams, but usually they are all strangers to me, or I have known them from previous dreams but can't remember when exactly.

I just looked at an article on the Psychology Today website and it suggests that the majority of strangers that appear in a dream are male and that they are usually threatening or aggressive but this almost never happens in my dreams.  The gender balance is fairly even and mixed and I very rarely experience threat or aggression, though it did happen recently with a middle aged Asian woman in a dream who jumped me from behind and others in the dream pulled her off me.

The people in my dreams are generally friendly or at least innocuous and we are always talking about things related to the mind, art, people and things I often can't remember.  Last night there was a couple, man and woman, sharing my bed (not in that way, so don't get your hopes up!).  They were lying on the other end of my bed and, honestly, it wasn't like a dream.  They were, in my experience, actually there with me.  I was trying to teach them Spanish, and they seemed interested for a while, but then got a bit overwhelmed and left.  Shortly before I was seated on a couch in a woman's artist studio and watched as she was working on a painting of trees and then she gave me ideas of how I might paint peacocks.  She was older with rather wild, curly grey hair.  Again, I was actually there, or so it seemed.

A few weeks ago I was talking with several people in a dream, among them a young man.  He asked me if I remembered any wars and I mentioned a few, including the World Wars.  Then he appeared a bit offended and said that I had forgotten Serbia.  Then I remembered the war in Yugoslavia and realized he had died there in 1993.  I apologized to him, I think we embraced, and he agreed to be my friend.

I could go on.  What I have come to believe is that in my dreams I meet people who have already died and that somehow we have befriended one another and this is all I can say right now.  It is rather unorthodox but no other explanation appears to work.  I have friends in the Unseen and we meet at night when I'm dreaming.