We Are Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

For the first 25 years of my life, I had AWESOME dreams at night.  They were always super vivid, full of color, and almost always full of my celebrity crushes, fun games, dazzling adventures, exciting places, etc.  I've had many moments of waking up laughing and smiling from dreams, so very many of which I could remember for days afterwards.  Very few made actual sense of course, like being able to fly around town to save the animals from the opera, or running away from Michael Jackson with Josh Groban while riding a motorcycle (Josh would be the celebrity crush, not Michael, in case anyone was wondering....), but what fun are dreams if they make sense?  Only very rarely would I have a dream that wasn't fun.  I can remember only a brief handful, like my sister getting kidnapped, my brother dying in a car crash, or my dad getting eaten by crocodiles.  Only once when I was a little kid did I have a reoccurring nightmare, where I was fleeing a drive-by shooting only to get trapped in a large building that was filling with water, and I would try to escape before drowning.   But that was it.  Mostly nights of super awesomeness.

Now however, post car accident and traumatic brain injury, my nights are full of bad dreams.  Some of them are super scary, most of them are just disturbing.  Like eating lunch in a building that I knew for sure was an Argentine hospital.  Nothing scary happened in the dream, Argentine hospitals have just always given me the creeps, and for my brain to drag that image out from years of being filed away just to creep my out in a dream is kind of weird.  Or last night I had a dream that my Grandma, who has been dead for like 17ish years, had my car towed because she didn't like where I parked it while I was arguing with my mom over whether or not my sister had turned into a terrorist (don't worry Ju, I was on your side).  While trying to chase down my car, some sketchy dude in a old, bright jade convertible asked me for money because he was poor.  Again, nothing scary happened, but it was just creepy.  Many of my dreams now involve huge buildings full of secrets passages and stairways, which in a normal setting would be one of the coolest things to explore ever, especially if there were fun secrets and treasures to discover.  But in all of these dreams, I'm usually being chased by ghosts or murderers or something like that, running through all of these trap doors and secret places trying to hide or run away.  Or if I have any dreams with my secret crush, he's always about to be hurt or killed or deported (because you know how dangerous the British are....) or he gets really angry at me for no reason, or just leaves forever, things like that.  I also keep having an increasing amount of dreams where I'm  not actually involved in the dream, I'm just watching it happen, and all of the people in my dream are strangers.  Many of these would actually make awesome movies or books, if I ever bothered to write them down more often.  There is always lots of action, and dramatic things happening, but so far no happy endings.

I wish I knew what was going on in my brain.  Alas, dreams are the one thing the internet doesn't know anything about.  Except for that one random psychic webpage that claims to have solved the mystery....