More about dreaming

I've been exhausted these past few days, and for several reasons. I'm still recovering from abdominal surgery, which wasn't nearly as bad as I expected, but it has taken a lot out of me. My OCD is incredibly draining as well, and I am constantly struggling with finding the right balance between pushing myself through my exposure-response therapy while also remembering to pace myself. But the most significant reason that I've been so tired recently is that I hate the dream world that I keep returning to. For all of the joy that I've been experiencing while I'm awake, I encounter the exact opposite when I am asleep. The feeling is so overwhelmingly dark that my mind's response is to avoid sleeping, even though my body knows I need it. Last night, however, I was so tired that I slept for eleven hours straight, and as I anticipated I returned once again to the exact same place.

As usual, I found myself as a patient in a mental institution. Unlike the inpatient facility that I stayed at in California, this place was bleak- more like a psych ward in an actual hospital (and yes, I do know what that's like, too). I always get the feeling that I am locked up inside many, many layers of doors, and that even if I was to find my way out of one of them, I would still be nowhere close to the outside world. Sometimes it feels like I'm being jailed, and punished as if mental illness was some sort of crime in this alternate reality. Other times I just feel completely isolated, because I don't have the ability to express my feelings to the people around me- even though in my mind, I feel sane. Either way, this feeling is eerily familiar, because my OCD really does make me a prisoner in my own mind. In my dreams, however, this sensation is exponentially magnified to the point where I can't see any hope.

In this particular dream, this hopelessness was exploited to make me even more miserable than I already was. I was told that I was being released, but I wasn't given any further details, and every time I tried to pack up, or ask about the arrangements, something would happen to get in the way. Meanwhile, I still had to put up with the day-to-day drudgery, lost in a sea of people, none of whom were my friend. There was a murder in my dream last night, and even though I wasn't the one who did it, I saw what happened. Not only was this traumatizing, but my presence at the scene also put me in danger, because while the staff was trying to grill me for details, the person who did it was threatening me so that I wouldn't give anything away. I kept silent, first and foremost to protect myself, but also because I wasn't quite sure that I should trust the people who ran this institution.

Needless to say, I woke up feeling deeply unsettled, and I can still sense a cloud hanging over me. I have so many good things that I want to write about, but I'm having a hard time shaking this gloominess off.