Personal, Psychology

On the sanity of living with another human being

I have vivid dreams. I mean: really, really vivid.

Sometimes they are so vivid I am convinced I am living them, until I wake up.

Sometimes they are so vivid they take the place of my memories and I occasionally get confused about whether or not something realistic that happened in a dream actually happened in real life.

This doesn’t happen often, but it happens occasionally.

One of the problems with vivid dreams is they tend to affect you emotionally…a lot.

I’m not talking about nightmares. I do get nightmares but nightmares just cause me to wake up suddenly, often in a cold sweat.

What I’m talking about are dreams that convince me I have to do something, or remind me I haven’t done something, or the like.

When it’s just reminding me about something I have to do, that’s actually helpful.

But when it reminds me of something I did (or more likely didn’t do) that I regret (not) doing, there’s a problem. The dream usually manages to convince me that I need to act and act fast. And this is in total contravention to the little voice in my head that tells me what the right thing to do is.

That voice in my head is usually remarkably effective. I know this because people tell me a lot that I “always do the right thing” or variations on that theme. People tell me I’m considerate, thoughtful, moral, etc, even when I don’t think that of myself. (I certainly have a long way to go before I will consider myself as considerate as I should be.)

But this voice in my head – this conscience or whatever you want to call it – which is normally rational or at least reflective, is drowned out by the vividness of my dreams. Waking up from a vivid dream that reminds me of my regrets is one of the few times I am possessed by emotion over the voice in my head for an extended period of time.

Yes, like anyone else, I get angry, happy, sad, moody, etc. But those things are fleeting – I generally have a very even keel, or so I tell myself – and those things I can diagnose. (I am my own psychiatrist). The dreams are different.

I cannot begin to describe the earnestness and urgency I feel when waking up from one of these dreams. I need to act. And it is all I can do not to give in. In fact, when I used to live alone, and when I used to be single, I couldn’t do anything but give in. And this resulted in some silly missteps. Nothing too serious (as far as I know) but things that the normal, even-keeled, owlish Riley wouldn’t do because they are obviously selfish, teenagerish, past-looking, flat out inexplicable, or what have you.

I have had two vivid dreams in the last year that told me I should attempt to rectify something that doesn’t need to be rectified, and both times I have overcome their crazy power. And I have done so only because I live with my girlfriend, and she keeps me from living in my head too much. Because I live with her, I have to recognize that it’s not just my dream-whims that matter, and that there are numerous more important things than regret.

Had I been single, or likely with anyone else for that matter, I would have embarrassed myself.

I know I would have because I have done it before. I have acted on vivid dreams in the past, to no good purpose.

As Viktor Frankl says, “live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!” So echoes the voice in my head.

So to extrapolate this to concerns greater than myself (to make it actionable, in the jargon of the day) I will use the should-have-been-discredited logic of induction: if the dreams of a overly rationalistic person such as myself have such force in my life, just imagine the power of dreams (and other emotional triggers) in the lives of James Holmes and Wade Michael Page.

It is only through genuine human relationships (whether they be romantic or not), based on trust and honesty that human beings can contain their strange emotional impulses to do whatever is the voice in their head thinks they shouldn’t do but that they really, really feel like they have to. When one is surrounded by people who one cares about, one is forced to think about consequences to others, not just ourselves.

It is harder for most of us – aside from sociopaths – to accept consequences for others than it is to accept consequences for ourselves.

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