Every once in a while I’ll wake up in the middle of the night from an awful nightmare and find myself terribly physically uncomfortable, usually overheating and needing to throw off all my blankets whilst still groggily under the spell of my dream.
I’ve always figured this was my brain cleverly figuring out the best way to wake me up quickly to attend to my discomfort was to give me a good scare, and this was the theory I expounded smugly to my husband while we were out at dinner the other night. “Hang on!” he said “Aren’t dreams just your brain trying to process the events of the previous couple of days? Isn’t it more likely it was the overheating that woke you up, and you just happened to be having a nightmare at the time?” In fact, if every time I wake up like this, I’m having a bad dream, maybe I’m just having nightmares all the time? And the only reason I remember these ones is because of the rude interruption, and normally they would all just drift off into my highly dysfunctional subconscious, to fester, hidden away from view? Forgotten but not gone.
I’m still processing this.