WOW! I just had one of the most powerful dreams that I can remember having in a very long time. Last night before going to bed around 11:45 or midnight, I read something in a book that said to pay attention to those dreams that wake you up between 3:30 AM and 5:30 AM because that's when most of the people around you are asleep and these dreams may be more psychically charged. I'm not sure if I fully believe that but I'd like to. I just woke at at 4:40 AM from a dream that was so real and so full of genuine feeling and emotion that when I was trying to record the fragments in my tape recorder just now, I broke down into tears. Most of my dreams contain bizarre elements that indicate that it couldn't be reality, but this one felt totally real! I've also heard some people say that some dreams are windows into alternate lives or alternate realities, and this dream definitely felt like that, although at times it played out like a movie. Well, here it is.
In this dream I was a patient at a mental institution during the 1960s or 1970s, judging from the clothing styles I saw and the interior decorating of some rooms in the building. It is hard from me to put together the sequence of events exactly because I was heavily drugged on psych medications. I know that I was interned in this place for years, at least two and a half years or more. All of the patients, including myself, were young people in their twenties, both male and female although I am the only male patient that I remember seeing.
One thing that I remember best is my escape attempt. I had somehow stolen a doctor's coat and made it outside of the building. It was a very cold night, possibly snowing lightly. The first thing I remember from the escape was walking through the front lawn of the main building towards the road, wearing my doctor's coat and feeling paranoid but alert. I could suddenly hear or see security guards ahead of me on the road and they seemed to be approaching so I quickly made a left towards some pine trees to try to lose them. Now I was on the right side of the large, brick building. I was walking along briskly when seemingly out of nowhere there appeared a young, caucasian orderly who was either outside smoking a cigarette or takinging the trash out (or both). I kept walking, thinking that my doctor disguise would work, but he noticed that something was wrong in my appearance, perhaps I didn't have an identification card hanging from my jacket, so he alerted nearby security forces and I was captured.
The next thing I remember is being reprocessed in Administration after being caught from my escape attempt. There was a very tender, sweet girl that worked in Admin and it seemed like she was a friend to myself and many of the other patients there. This girl was in her early twenties and had light, orange hair that was almost a strawberry color. She had a round, cherubic face and her complexion was very pale. During this time when I was being processed I got up and went into one of the adjacent rooms in Admin, which I think I wasn't supposed to do. In this room I saw many clothing outfits hanging on a rack. On each outfit was a small tag that had written on it the name of one of my fellow patients. I could tell that this girl who worked in Admin had put together an outfit for every patient, based on what she percieved our personalities to be. Maybe she intended to give us each our outfit upon release from the place. This is how I know this was decades ago because all of the outfits were definitely of a vintage style to me, although in the dream they looked new and in the dream they styles were contemporary to me. The fact that this girl had gone to all of this trouble came across as the most thoughtful and sweet thing to me. She had obviously put an enormous amount of time into putting together each outfit, and like I said, all of the clothes were reflective of the individual personality of the patient.
I timidly asked this young woman if she had made an outfit for me, and tears seemed to well-up in her eyes. "Of course I did," she said. She motioned to a rack where I saw a blue, cordorouy suit hanging. It had a vest included and on the jacket there was pinned a sparkling, white ribbon. She asked me if I liked it and I replied that in real life I had never worn anything nearly that cool. This made her cry a little bit more although she was smiling sincerely. "Really?" she asked. "Are you serious?" I said "of course" and we both broke down in tears. I could tell that I had a deep, caring relationship with this girl and I suspect that everyone in the mental institution loved her.
I remember another point when a friend of mine was getting released from the institution. She was tall, skinny, and blonde and I remember that she had been there for two and a half years which is how I figure that I was there even longer than 2.5 years. As she was being released, I was seeing her off along with another girl in her twenties that worked there. This girl was short and had brown hair and I had an enormous crush on her. She looked a lot like a girl that I saw in a Youtube video a few weeks ago. We exchanged hugs with the blonde girl and all three of us were in tears but we were so happy that she was finally getting her freedom.
The weirdest and coolest part of the dream involved me being heavily drugged and observed. This may have occurred after my escape attempt. I was in a room with many beds and the beds were all full of patients like me who had been heavily drugged in order to keep them under control. I was basically in a drug-induced stupor for days at a time here. I remember waking up at various times and seeing the brunette that I had a crush on in the room observing us. Sometimes I would have fits where I would flail my arms and legs and scream. During one of these fits, I began screaming "IT'S A DREAM!!! IT'S A DREAM!!! NONE OF THIS IS REAL!!! LET ME OUT!!!" The brunette was there along with several other orderlies and she looked very worried for me. I knew she was there while I was having this fit and I think I embellished a bit in order to try and get more attention from her. I find it very eerie that I was yelling about being in a dream. Maybe my consciousness was attempting to achieve lucidity, or maybe I was just a crazy dude screaming in a loony bin.
There is a part of me that believes this all took place in England, although I can't exactly remember the accents I was hearing from everyone. There's a lot I can't remember from this dream because, like I said, I was heavily drugged in the context of the dream. The whole feel of the dream was like a Nick Drake song to me, so that's why I sort of get the feeling that I could have been in England. After waking up from this dream and recording the fragments in my tape recorder, I looked outside the window here at my brother's house and I saw a black cat crossing the street. As I stared at it, it turned around and looked back at me. Very, very weird night tonight . . . but I like it. I'm going to try to go back to sleep now. I've been up for an hour recording this.
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