I used to wake up in hysterics. I used to take pills to make them stop. I used to draw my visions in a diary.

I used to do a lot of things. But I guess I don’t anymore. The surprise is gone. I have grown accustomed to these horrifying dreams. Now I wake up with an eerie feelings of foreshadowing, but that goes away after a few minutes.

For a long time, I have had dreams about the end of the world. Or at least the end of the human race. I think they started a few months before I entered high school, but I can’t be sure. All’s I know is that I have come to expect them, and they hardly ever change. I get a sense of familiarity each time I have one.
Not that that makes them enjoyable or easier to stomach.

It’s always the same dream, with maybe a little variation in the location and the weather. Sometimes it’s in a beachfront shanty. Sometimes it’s in my house. Or in a garage. Or a military hangar. Sometimes there’s storms, sometimes there’s not. There’s always lots of people around, usually the same crowd–my family, my friends, and a myriad of indistinguishable faces, all paralyzed by fear, streaked with tears.
I read up on dream interpretation after I started having them regularly in high school. Apparently, end-of-the-world nightmares signify that there is something going wrong in your life that instills in you a feeling of my-life-is-out-of-control. Or you have a guilty conscience. Recurring dreams usually mean that whatever is going wrong in your life is continually not being addressed, and so you’ll keep having the dreams until that bad thing in your life IS addressed. Like when your gas tank is almost empty and that little light won’t go off until you fill ‘er up.

So I tried to change my life to make the dreams go away. Because after all, who likes having emotionally and psychologically disturbing dreams about the cessation of life as we know it?

In high school, my soul was about as unclean as a bottle of Aquafina. I had no guilt on my conscience and nothing to worry about. I was a good little Catholic girl who did her homework and didn’t curse. The only alcohol I’d ever tasted was during my daily Listerine regimen. I was as pure as you can get, and thus I didn’t know what to do or change to make them stop.

I started taking sleeping pills around this time. I had begun to have these dreams several times a week. I was afraid to go to sleep because it was pretty much inevitable that I would wake up screaming and crying. So I was put on pills to make me stop dreaming, to put me in such a deep sleep that I would no longer be bothered with these nightmares. And boy, did they work. These pills could put a full-grown horse into a coma. And they did the same to me. I would have to allow myself at least 8 hours of sleepy time after taking them, because it would be almost impossible to wake me up any time before then.

Well, just my luck that I was allergic to them. Around thanksgiving of my 9th-grade year in high school, perhaps a week after I had begun to take them, I woke up choking. My throat had nearly swelled shut, because the active ingredient in the pills was making my childhood asthma flare up. My mother did not deem it necessary to go to the emergency room, and I had long since stopped using my inhaler, so I had to wait it out until my system had cleared the allergen. It was 3 days before I could breathe right again.

Obviously, I stopped taking these pills. And as a result, I started having the dreams again. Just as frequent, just as bad. I sought counseling at this point, because my dreams began to interfere with my life. They were all I could think about. I had become clinically depressed. I was bothered immensely, to say the least. And I was having them nearly every night. Among other things, the head doctor told me to keep a dream journal and try to decipher them. So I did. Sometimes I wrote them down, sometimes I drew them. I preferred drawing them, because it helped me burn off some of the nervous energy I would wake up charged with after having one of those dreams. Soon enough, I had sketch diaries filled with essentially the same pictures over and over again, each marked with a different date.

Incidentally, the counseling I underwent for a few years did nothing to make the dreams stop.

I also started this habit of, after each dream, reading and rereading the Revelation. I looked for anything that I saw in my dreams, and if any passages jumped out at me. If my dreams made the cryptic symbology of the Revelation any clearer.

For a time, I stopped having these dreams. This was around sophomore year of college, perhaps 6 years after I had begun to have these dreams. I had become promiscuous and a drug addict around this time, too. I wonder if there was any connection between the two. After perhaps a few months, I started having them again. Combined with the psychological effects of the drugs, I really wondered if I was going insane.

About a year and a half ago, I stopped doing drugs. I also stopped sleeping around. Essentially, I stopped doing all the bad things I began to do once I left my Catholic upbringing for college. I was still having these nightmares, and I couldn’t figure out why. I still don’t know why I have them.

They always start out okay. Under a beautiful, clear sky, laughing with my friends, or enjoying time with my family. Then everything darkens. Almost literally does the sky become as sackcloth, and the moon as blood. Everyone starts to flip out– me especially, because I know what’s coming. Fire streaks the sky like jet trails. The clouds open up and arrows of fire fall down towards earth. At first, we only see them in the far distance, plummeting to the ground and erupting in light and white-hot radiation. And then we see their ominous glow heading towards us. I know I’m going to die, and I know my family and friends and going to die. And we’re going to die a horrifying, painful death. We’re going to be cooked alive when it hits the ground.

I’m crying by now, and I can feel it. I can feel the stinging in my eyes, the dampness on my cheeks, the heaving sadness in my belly as I sob. I can feel the sheer terror ripping through me; I can feel the hairs on my neck standing up. As the fire arrows– or nuclear missiles I’m assuming they symbolize– draw nearer, my fear reaches a peak. As they touch down and explode, I wake up. I am crying hysterically, I am trembling with fear, and my skin burns from the fire that engulfed me in my nightmare.

After having these dreams for nearly a decade, I am convinced that there is some unseen meaning behind them. Something huge and inconceivably horrific is going to happen, and I have seen it happen so many times. I have been alive in all of the dreams, as have my family and friends, so whatever is going to happen is going to happen soon. There must be a reason I have had these dreams for the last 9 years, and why I know I will continue to have them. And there must be a reason that I was almost fatally allergic to the one thing that made me stop having them. So is it fate that I have these dreams? Are they prophecies? Am I having visions of the WWIII to come? Is this the Revelation spoken of in the Bible? Is it a gift, or am I just going insane?

Author: FoosballWizard

September 1st, 2007 at 12:00 pm in Philosophy and Religion

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