waking_dreams ovenbird My brain occasionally decides it would be fun to have nightmares while awake. Why limit nightmares to sleep time? You can have so many more of them if you use waking hours as well! They have often happened at times of hormonal chaos–puberty was when they happened the most frequently, postpartum was another. They stem from sleep but carry on into the few moments after waking so that I can be sitting up in bed, eyes open, able to get up and walk around, but the dream is still happening. So for instance. I’m about 15 years old. I wake up suddenly an hour after I’ve fallen asleep and I can feel that everything is wrong. The world has been turned inside out. There’s a presence in the room with me. At the end of my bed my brother is perched, not looking at me, but saying “it’s time, it’s time” over and over in a monotone. “Time for what?!” I choke out in horror. “Time for what?!” I fall out of bed, stumble into the hallway. I’m screaming. It wakes my parents. But my brother is definitely not sitting on the end of my bed. Once I army crawled from my bed to the door in the dark trying to evade laser beams that would slice me in half if I touched them. Once, in a less sinister version, a tiny helicopter was flying around my room. In some other time I might have been made a shaman or hung for a witch. Neither option sounds particularly appealing. In this time there are treatments and theories and rationalizations, none of which make any difference when you’ve woken up to find your bed is full of spiders. 250406 ... raze i'm endlessly fascinated by the mind's ability to show us things that aren't really there (or are they?) in that liminal space between awake_and_dreaming, even when the results are often horrifying. some of my own waking dreams are documented on the surveillance and white_noise blathes. nightmares in general have always been deeply compelling to me, in large part because the things that frighten us aren't always obvious at all. an innocuous moment can turn sinister on something as simple as a facial expression or a thought. i don't mind seeing squirrels_in_the_dark. but it's been a while since that's happened. 250406 ... ovenbird It wasn't quite a waking dream as the image didn't hold its shape with eyes open but occurred more like a vision as I was falling asleep... But in those conscious moments preceding sleep I could suddenly see so clearly and with such force a raven the size of a small child holding a piece of bread in its beak, a wordless gift. 250429 ... ovenbird I woke up suddenly at 4am. I was sure someone was in the room with me. I could feel the shape of their body standing at the end of my bed. I could feel this substantial ghost crawl under the covers next to me and fall asleep, evaporating into nothingness while, confused, I said "who are you?" to the darkness. 250506 what's it to you? who go blather from