Weird Dream

I am prone to having weird dreams. Often times, I dream that I am naked in a public place. I tend to be okay with being naked at the start of the dream, for whatever reason, even though I do realize that I am naked. But soon enough I become bored with my nudity and then when people begin to populate my near environment, I become shy. No apple needed. I start running around and hiding behind things; a few nights ago it was a bus shed, weeks before that it was a shrub. No one else seems to ever mind my being naked in these dreams. Usually when I awake I am clothed. However, there have been some cases in which I wake up and I am out of my bed, sometimes out of my room - which, when in college meant that I was in a public passage like the hallway - NAKED. I kid you not. Luckily, as far as I know, no one has ever seen me in this state and I usually come to my senses within a few seconds and gun it back to my room.

Last night however, I had a very weird dream, and when I woke from it, I was a hot mess. I dreamt that I had come across this old woman in the street. She was sick and had been trying to see a doctor for a while, but no one would see her because she was homeless and poor. How I knew this information is a blur, but that's what happens in dreams. I met her just at the moment that she decided to curl up her sick self on the street in a blanket. And then she closed her eyes... and died.

Morbid.

Everyone continued walking along. A few people stopped and stared. But no one else really bothered with her. I was the only one crouching over her, and as I noticed that she was dead, this extreme sadness overcame me. In the dream, I started to cry.

What had happened was that when I saw the dead woman, I began to think about how she was somebody's daughter, maybe someone's sister, perhaps even someone's muzza. I tried to understand how she might have ended up so poor, so alone and so sick, and how everyone had shunned her instead of extending a hand, and how sad it was that she was laying in a public street, so stripped of all her dignity, dead. And how the world continued to turn and the people continued to live, apparently oblivious to this very sad thing that had just occurred. And I thought of my Muzza, and how terribly sad it would be for her to die under such circumstances. And so I cried some more. Soon enough, I was all out sobbing, my head in my hands, my tears falling on the floor next to this dead woman with whom I had not exchanged a single word in life. And the people eventually could no longer ignore me, and they stopped and bowed their heads, as if to commiserate with me when in reality, I was not in any more need of their sympathy than they were of mine.

Strangely (or, perhaps not) when I awoke, I was crying. Like, bawling. And for a good two or three minutes, I was trying to tell myself, "it's just a dream, stop crying!" But I couldn't. Finally, I fell back asleep. I think there is only one conclusion I can draw from this dream:

I am going crazy.

The scene of the dying woman was reminiscent of the picture I posted here a while back of the dying Jewish child in the Warsaw ghetto. It's what I had described as one of the saddest images I have ever seen. Maybe this is why the dream bothered me so much. I have no idea.

All I know is that oddly enough, I woke up this morning feeling quite good emotionally. Maybe there's something to be said about beginning the day with a good hard cry about what a shit hole we've made the world into so that we can then move on and be productive for the rest of the day. Regardless, I am still slightly haunted by my dream last night, but I am hoping that soon enough I'll recover.