Astral Therapy
A creative journal piece ~
Playing with the curious relationship between dreams, feelings and reality. I hope you enjoy and please feel welcome to comment with your thoughts below xo
Nothing is worse than waking from a sleep that doesn’t relieve your pain. When your dreamscape just spends the night investigating your suffering. Instead of falling asleep and healing in the heavy nothingness of delta waves, your mind tests and turns your sorrow like a Rubix cube of emotions and fears. It ponders and plays with infinite possibilities, offering different storylines and scenarios for your sadness to manifest. It hurls you, without consent, into a multidimensional landscape where imagination becomes the surgeon dissecting your feelings. Your dreams start to stretch and squish your pain, testing the boundaries and obscurities of what you feel.
What if this happened?
Or perhaps if it played out like this?
What if they abandoned you by doing this instead?
What if they hurt you in a thousand other ways?
Does the emotion still unfold the same?
You become a test animal, a science experiment, for the tripartite of your mind. Your id, ego, and superego poke and prod and sigh.
Your mind distorts the line between reality and fiction, leaving you perceptive but impressionable and vulnerable. This is how it squishes your heart into odd shapes and sizes; it pushes you into odd places like play dough. The very structure of your suffering remains fundamentally the same, but in your dreams, your suffering becomes fractal as your mind splits it open like a kaleidoscope. The feeling you took to bed gestates and grows, like a foetus developing in a mother’s womb.
The feelings you went to sleep with are still entirely real, soaked into the tissue of your body. But the scenarios that created them get contorted and replayed while you’re immobilised and held hostage against your will. While asleep, you may be forced to endure unrelenting doses of intense and painful emotion. And sometimes, when you awaken, the emotion has tripled in weight, like a mother whose heart expands after giving birth. Your sorrow grows after watching the fiction of your dreams. The emotion is more significant, amplified and intelligent. It’s like your dreams have given it reason, knowledge and substance. It becomes harder to move or dissolve.
It’s become a living thing buried inside of you. The sadness is sentient, hungry and a part of you.
You awaken in the morning, even more upset than before, chastised by the memories of your dreams. You perform emotional triage and put your heart back in your chest, even though it’s bruised and struggling for a beat. You wipe away the tears that mourn unrealities and enter the day knowing you’ve been awake somewhere else. You’ve been suffering the experimental therapy of the night.
When you sleep, your two worlds collide and content can freely pass between realms. It’s that moment when you know it was all just a dream, but what you’re left with is entirely real. The tears on your cheeks aren’t imaginary. The slice in your heart doesn’t feel poetic. You are the victim of a painful tragedy, a cataclysm from the bedrock of your dreams. When the occult hours of sleep produce such strong emotion, it expands too much and starts to transcend. It pulses through the brainwaves like a satellite relaying a signal and ripples through the layers of your consciousness. The anger, the grief, the savage sorrow descend from your imagination and flood your limbic brain. Your sleeping body is overdosed on sensation and becomes hijacked by sensory emotion. Your body starts to feel as the emotion surges from your dream, like an ocean starting to swallow a ship. The emotion starts to swallow your reality.
You awaken. Crying. Gasping. Or frozen.
Not rested, but wounded from another world.
Wounded by the weight of how much you feel.
