I dream every day

I dream every day.
Not the "I want to be a rock star!" kind of dream — the kind you see when you sleep.

Even in a short nap.
Full color, with sound and vision sharp and clear.

Mostly nightmares.
Sometimes they're grand — major earthquakes, the end of the world — but most of them are realistic.

Dreams of spending time in unsanitary places while feeling thoroughly disgusted (I'm somewhat germophobic and hate unclean places), or of being scolded by a work partner for causing them trouble — with lines that stab straight into the heart. (That feeling of being told exactly what you don't want to hear.)

When that happens, waking up isn't just "Ah, it was a dream — thank goodness." The events in the dream are so shocking that they stick with me.

During busy periods at work this state continues, and it wears me down mentally.
I try to reset by exercising and making days where I go to bed early, but most mornings I still wake up thinking, "Ugh, another awful dream."

We still barely understand how dreams work (I don't take dream fortune-telling seriously — it's full of woo), but stress and your deeper psychology probably shape them.

And I've heard one theory that nightmares help you instinctively avoid a bad future by imagining it first — or make stress easier to accept.

In the case of being scolded by a work partner: if it's a scenario where I'd cause them huge trouble or act dishonorably, showing me "if you do that, this is what happens" might make me more careful in how I usually behave.

Given my personality, I unconsciously imagine negative futures.
I don't want nightmares — but my thinking is set up to have them.

People often say unconscious thought determines your life, and that's probably true.

Controlling unconscious thought is hard, but I want to change some routine and improve that unconscious thinking.

Nightmares are exhausting. Nothing dramatic happened, but today's dream was rough, so I turned it into a blog post.