Staring Series
My Tenth-grade year of high school was the beginning of my dreams. Regularly, I would have terrible dreams of people dying, and I would live out their deaths as them in my dreams. As a teenager, I researched dreams, and a lot of the research described dreams as a reflection of yourself and your mind unconsciously trying to deal with stress. As I journaled and prayed about everything I was experiencing, I decided that one of my problems was that I was naturally excluding myself from my peers. That year, one of my goals was to make friends with everyone and try to be as normal as possible. This was also based on advice a Priest gave me when I was a very young girl because I did experience weird things, and I did share them with the Priest, and his exact words were, “Try to be normal and happy..”
Wanting to be a normal teenage girl and go out with friends caused conflict between me and my parents because they were very strict. I had a curfew, and they expected me to do well in school. The conflict between me trying to be normal, my dreams, and my parents doing the right thing as parents, I felt like I was constantly being watched and had pressure on myself. This series is an expression of how I felt during that time.
Lifeline: Lifeline is based on a dream I would have of people who died before they could accomplish a specific goal. They all had horrendous deaths, but the most interesting part of the dream was the people were so angry about not being able to accomplish a personal goal, which was to do something terrible to someone else. Their deaths seemed well deserved; however, nothing could stop me from listening to all the terrible things they planned, and the irony is they would scream out so “righteously.” Most of them were so angry they would fill themselves with blue. In the dream, I couldn’t tell if the pool they floated in was blue or if there were so many blue people it made the pool look blue.
Fertile: In this dream, the people were all hunters, and they liked to hunt big game, i.e., people. Their deaths were joyous to them because they had such an intense obsession with hunting that to be the hunted was exhilarating for them. The dream was set in fields and woods, and whenever I would have this dream, which was a lot, it was the most stressful dream because everyone was hunting each other. This dream would also cause me to have a lot of epiphanies because there were so many moments of me fighting for my life that I needed to have resolved to win.
The winner: Sometimes I would end my dreams with me in a chair trying to understand everything. Many times I would spend time in this chair just trying to deal with the intensity of my dreams and a man would approach me and say “You belong here, thats why your winning” I would always respond “I don’t belong here I don’t like it here.” This man was a prominent figure in my dreams and just laughed at everything. One day I went to figure drawing class and walks in a man that looked exactly like him and drew his protrait. At that time I was convinced that maybe my dreams were stress mixed with small psychic abilities. I repeatedly told myself that I was just stressed and these dreams were my mind creating choas because I didn’t fully feel I had control.
Happy People In Hell: I don’t know if I am dreaming of hell, but my dreams are so hellish. I don’t know where I get this from. however, in this place, there were people living quite happily. The craziest thing these people would taunt me and make fun of my need to have clarity and relatonships with my family. However overall they seemed to be getting along great in this world of terrible things.