I’ve been prescribed a mood-stabilising drug since my illness last year.

One of the (many) side effects of Citaopram is the impact on sleeping patterns and in particular the creation of extremely vivid dreaming. Many of the dreams I’ve had over the last year have been extremely gory and unpleasant although within the scenarios presented I’ve been an observer to them. And usually witness to the gore,which is far from pleasant. Whilst I was still employed at my last job, the gore-fest dreams were interspersed with paranoia and anxiety dreams, so on the plus point these have stopped.

Dreaming in vivid overload

The last couple of these monsters I have found myself being within the storyline rather than observing. And in both I’ve been taken to a point where one assumes it is me that has passed on, although the dreams seem to hold an air of transience about this point.

For instance in the last one where I was driving down a steep hill into the path of an oncoming avalanche (as you do) the scenario was very much a no-escape one. Yet after impact I’m walking around through the snow looking into empty cars caught up in the avalanche. It was all very peaceful which made me think (once I’d woken up) it was some form of ghostly thing at the end (doesn’t matter whether or not you believe in ghosts as this was a dream which wasn’t real either!).

Last night a huge nuclear missile had been left in a city. Careless I suppose. Anyway, someone in the authorities dried to move it with a trolley or something equally daft and it fell over and blew up. Obviously!

There then seems to be a series of scenarios being played out where I’m running to avoid the explosion and finding places to hide.

First up, a chest freezer, something well reported to be able to withstand any level of nuclear disaster….. Anyway, I was worried about freezing to death so ditched that.

Then I climbed down into the sewers (clearly at the speed of light to avoid the oncoming apocalypse) but then realised the flames would follow my path and that would end badly too.

I’m then in the mountains. Perhaps it was a RyanAir flight into the city and that’s where they dropped me off – who knows. Anyway I realised  I would need loads and loads of tinned food as the landscape would surely be contaminated.  But having magically stockpiled loads of food I then found my mountain was suddenly full of people trying to take the food and arguing/fighting over it.

At this point I got up and walked into the blinding light of the explosion figuring I might as well get it over and done with.

I doubt many dream diaries would cover this sort of material!