This post will be about nightmares - yes those...

I don't know how it is for you, dearest reader, but for me my nightmares always feel unshakingly real. As you probably could tell from my post Dreams 1 I have fairly vivid dreams and can often remember full dreams, multiple dreams from one night or at least I can describe a scene or a feeling.

Nightmares, for me personally, always feel very real and present when I wake up. Even though I know logically that it was a nightmare for the first 10 or 15 minutes of being awake in the middle of the night I'm awake but still rapped up in the blanket of the senario of the nightmare. I can often feel my body respond to it - my pulse won't settle and my muscles will still be tensing up to protect me from the unreal but unshakingly present threat of the dream world.

I remember a specific event that perfectly illustrates this situation - I woke up in the middle of the night from a nightmare: in the dream someone would appear as a shadow on the outside of my window, becoming a silhouette across the pulled shut curtain. At the time I was living in the room next to the front door of our house (since I have moved and now live in a room on the top floor). I used to call this room the burglary room as it is - apart from our sturdy blue painted front door it's the most logical point of entry for any uninvited guests.

I couldn't shake the dream, I kept on staring at the window. I knew I was awake, I knew that the dream was really fiction and it manifesting as reality would be an unlikely and far fetched possibility. But still, the illogical side of me was dead convinced that at any moment the silhouette would appear and I could not settle down - I had to call and wake up my at the time boyfriend and he had to talk me down for a few minutes to break the trans like state of being convinced that the dream is reality.

These days when I wake from a nightmare I try to read or listen to a radio show, sometimes even watch telly. It's like there is a need for an hour of normality to break the hovering feeling of the dream world.

It works the same with pleasant dreams for the first few hours of the morning I feel a strong presence of them, I remember all the details and can sometimes still feel the feelings of the dream. Whereas, with sad dreams I will every once in a while wake up and realise that I'm crying.