Dreams of Death

One of the side-effects of the fibromyalgia is that many people have trouble getting to deep sleep. For some reason, they can't seem to get passed the dreamstate, so they never get truly rested, which is why they are always so tired. For me, this has been a problem most of my life. I keep having what I call "dream nights" where I just dream the entire night. Leaves me absolutely exhausted, it does...

I dream a lot. All sorts of strange dreams, many whom leaves me worried about my mental state, haha! But one thing I dream too much of, in my opinion, is dying. I've lost count of how many times I've died in my dreams.

Someone once told me that if we've died in specifically bad ways in our previous lives, the fear of dying like that again is imprinted deep within us, causing recurring nightmares about it. So, if we have repeated dreams where we die in the same way, it's supposedly that fear. If that's true, I've been shot, drowned in the lava from an errupted vulcano, killed in massive earthquakes and floods that has destroyed the world, and stood in the wake of an exploded atomic bomb.
Those are the ways I always, always die, in my dreams. The most common one is the atomic bomb. I always see that cloud, and the shockwave moving towards me, and I get that horrible feeling where I know that I'll be dead within seconds, and there's nothing I can do. And I just accept it. The second most common one is a natural disaster, either by earthquakes and floods, or vulcanos. Or, the most fun ones, those combined. The entire land around me is just utterly destroyed, and I know it's not caused by man. The ones where I get shot aren't too common, but they do repeat themselves. I usually get shot in the back, trying to escape something, or someone.

I never wake up just before I die. I wake up during, or right after. So, I always get to feel that feeling I can never seem to explain. Dread, despair, fear, defeat, acceptance... Something in between, maybe. I don't know. If that's what it feels like to die...

Anyway.

It's always the same. I've never, ever dreamt that I died in any other way, and I've died way more often than I'd like to admit to anyone. The only exception... Is last night. I dreamt that I died, again. But nothing about that dream was anything like what I usually dream. And the feeling I had, throughout the entire dream, in the back of my mind... It's still kind of there, telling me that it wasn't a dream. It sounds ridicules, but for some reason that dream just had a massive impact on me. It wasn't really that much of a nightmare even. Not really.


I was with my mum and dad, and my brother, and we were all living together in their house. It wasn't the house they live in right now, cause it was very different, and placed somewhere else, but I can't remember if it was a house I've seen before, or something my mind just made up. And the sky suddenly became really weird. I looked outside, wondering why the sky was so strange, and I saw this gigantic hand, dark purple-ish with black claws, reaching out of the sky itself and grabbing hold of a house somewhere in the distance. And within seconds, the house was destroyed, and I just knew that everyone in the house was dead.

I just thought to myself, as everyone started to panic, that this couldn't be real. It was too bizarre. This couldn't be happening. This was reality, earth, where these things were impossible. So, we couldn't die. We couldn't be killed by this hand. It was just not real. Yet, at the same time, I knew. I knew that we would soon be dead, and there was nothing we could do about it. I heard this strange sound, and I swear it felt like I was suddenly trapped within a second. All the emotions I felt, at the same time, rushing through me. And that feeling... That despair, that horrible fear, knowing that this is the end. Defeat. And, in a way, acceptance. It all happened in a second, and it felt like an eternity, and I died.

There was no pain. Just that horrible feeling.

Then I think I was in some kind of room. Or a space of some sort. There wasn't really anything there, and it was kind of blurry. Or foggy, maybe. But I could see energy around us, moving. I don't know if it was moving out of us, or into us, or just around us. But it was there. And I remember wondering why I could still feel. I was supposed to be dead, so why did I still feel?
Mum was there, but my dad and my brother was only there for a fragment of a second before they were gone, and the energy with them. I don't remember if someone came and told us, or somehow we just knew, but my dad and my brother had been sent to heaven. They had completed all of life, and were done with it. They had been given the ultimate reward. Heaven.

Then we were in a city. A strange and unusal city, in a way. It looked very much like an ordinary human city on earth, but there were some buildings that seemed off. And that feeling... Like there was something not quite right about the place. It just felt different. Wrong, in a way. And then someone came, or maybe they had been with us all along - I really don't remember - and they told us that we were dead, mum and I. But we weren't going to heaven.

Sometimes, when people died, instead of going to heaven, they'd end up in that place. It's not hell, they said, cause there's no such thing, but it's the closest you can get. I remember jokingly asking if it was earth, and their responce was "Similar, but not quite."
Going to heaven meant that you were done with life, and that you were cleared for the "upper level", or something like that. But every now and then, people got the chance to earn their way back to life. A second chance of some sort. And they had to work their way through that world to earn it. Mum had done that - gotten that chance. I don't know if they meant that she would go back to her old life, or that she would be reborn into a new one, but she had been given the chance to earn her way back to earth, at least according to their records. That's why she wasn't sent off to heaven.

Heaven is the ultimate reward, but it is a one way ticket. Once you go there, you can't go back. Life is permanently over for you. That's what they said. Depending on who you are, going to heaven can be a really good thing, or a really bad thing. Life may not be as good as heaven, but it is life, at least.

But me... I baffled them. According to their records, I was not allowed to go to heaven, ever. So when I died, they had no other choice but to place me in that world. They didn't know what else to do. They didn't even know why their records said that I could never go to heaven. All I know is that I felt like I didn't belong anywhere.

Then mum was gone, and I was on my own, in that strange city. I suppose she went off to do what she needed to do to earn her way back to life, but I don't really remember. I just know that I was alone. And I had no idea what to do. Could I earn my way back to life? Could they send me somewhere else? Or was I stuck in this city forever?

I've forgotten most of the dream in that place, but I do remember finding some other people to get along with - the city was filled with people, of course, but these were the important ones. They were strangers, but company. They were stuck there as well, trying to earn their way back to life, although I was the only one in my situation. We were trying to figure out how to survive. None of us had money, or a job, or a place to live. The rule of the city, apparently, was that you had to survive on your own. No help. But we stuck together. We were four, or maybe five, people, and we had decided to work together.

I had been out for a walk, and I had gotten a card from someone that was renting out a space for opening a store, and we were in the middle of discussing how we could work together to survive when I brought out that card. Maybe we could manage, together, to get enough money for that place? We could open up a store. They all had things they could sell - items, their services - so it would be a way to get by. I remember thinking that I could make jewelry and sell it.

I wasn't happy. But I was clinging on to the hope that somehow I'd find a solution. I'd get out of the situation I was in. Hope was really all I had.

And then I woke up.

And in that moment, I had that horrible feeling that the dream had showed me what was going to happen. The dream was just a dream, but what I saw in the dream, that city, it was all real. And I wasn't supposed to know. I saw something no one was supposed to see.


I know it's ridicules. I know it was just a dream. But it has haunted me the entire day, and I still feel really uncomfortable. Like I saw something I wasn't supposed to. And it makes me want to hide. I don't even know why.
It was one of the strangest dreams I've ever had - not because the content was all that strange (I've had weirder dreams), but because of the feeling that followed me in that dream. That feeling that's trying to convince me that it wasn't a dream, even though I know that it was.

Then again, some of the info I have on my work has come from dreams, so maybe this was just another way for me to learn something about Arcaiia. I don't know. All I know is that one giant part of me prays I'll enver dream something like that again, while another tiny part of me wants to go back.

Along with all those strange feelings the dream gave me, there's that nagging one telling me that there's something I have to know.

Maybe I just need more sleep.