Dreams that leave us sad, irritable, and confused

It’s not vodka, but my dream, that leaves me hungover!

Having weird dreams is quite normal because we all have that once in a while. That’s when you head to Google to interpret your dream, and you realize that these dreams are common, and just the result of your anxiety, overthinking, and lost thoughts.

Dreaming about random things, I have observed the pattern of how my subconscious sends me different kinds of dreams. It’s always about the thing that I take a look at in real life, but don’t really give much thought to… And then it converts into a dream and gets into my head to irritate me for the night.

For example, once I saw a cat with blue eyes, but then my bus suddenly arrived and I took off. However, the picture of that blue-eyed cat remained somewhere in my subconscious, and guess who decided to show up in my dream that night? Giant Blue Cat Monster!

I understood this pattern and now I have a lot of ‘conscious’ thoughts about something I am scared about or ‘don’t want a surprise visit from’ in my dreams. Lizards — they make me uncomfortable, scared, and triggered. When I see random social media photos of lizards while scrolling before bed or literally see a lizard in my room — I try to give a lot of thought about ‘lizards’ with consciousness so that I do not have a dream about, say ‘rain of lizards on me’.

Ah! Things that I have to do to keep my dreams clean.

Dreaming of my grandfather whom I lost in 2021

I lost my grandfather back in 2021 and was affected by his death because I could never bid goodbye to him and attend the funeral. This was during the pandemic, and I was stuck in another city. All I could see was the funeral in ‘video call’ and not be there physically.

Two years later, I had an afternoon dream which left me crying, crying a lot. I dreamt of my grandpa that he had gone to live somewhere else, with an acquaintance, and I am seeing him through a video call that he is peacefully having his lunch. Here, he is also saying “ I cannot come back anymore, you guys have to live a good life”.

In my dream, I was heartbroken and furious about the situation… I rushed to that acquaintance’s house, only to see him running away from me as fast as he could. I was trying to call him, but he kept walking away.

And that’s the moment where I could feel the despair and the distress of knowing that if ‘something is gone’, it cannot return in real life and that’s when I woke up crying…

I again had a similar dream in 2024 where again my grandfather was living a house away from us, running from me, and saw him get cremated by mistake, by a random person. This was disturbing to me, and I woke up feeling with nauseating sadness.

Sleep Paralysis and Lucid Dreams

I have experienced sleep paralysis quite a few times, in addition to lucid dreams.

Sleep Paralysis is when your body is unable to move or speak while you are fully awake. This is a situation while transitioning between sleep and wakefulness.

I have felt this state quite a few times when in my dream people are running towards me, or I’m in the middle of a war, or I’ve to catch a moving train. The adrenaline in these kinds of dreams feels all too real, but my body remains frozen — unable to act out. These are the dreams when they turn ‘lucid’ and you become ‘aware’ that you think “Oh! It’s just a dream”.

Lucid dreams happen when you are fully aware that you are dreaming while still inside the dream. In this state, you can sometimes narrate your own dream and walk through it.

When my sleep paralysis turned into lucid dreams, I felt trapped.

I remember one time when I was sleeping in my room and I was dreaming of being in the same room. In the dream, I saw crows cawing outside, their sharp calls were piercing the stillness as it was nighttime. I even checked out the time, it was around 1 am, and felt quite a creepy vibe.

While in my room, in my dream — I suddenly realized I was dreaming, and that ‘realization’ made me panic. I knew I couldn’t wake up. My eyes felt like someone glued them shut. No matter how desperately I wanted to open my eyes, it was not happening. I felt helpless and suffocated.

In that moment of desperation, I somehow surrendered and let the dream happen. This is where I went to sleep in the room of my dream. This caused me to wake up quickly in the room of my reality.

Phew, what an experience. Quite like Inception?

There are many other weird dreams like ‘sequence dreams’ that I had, but let’s keep them for the next time…

In the meantime, tell me some of your weird dreams in the comments below :)