@extraspecialbitter Dreams arrive uninvited, unfiltered, and often unwelcome. They do not negotiate with my nervous system the way waking life does. There is no masking in them, no managed script, nor any performance of composure. Whatever my mind has been holding gets deposited there without my consent, and sometimes I wake carrying something I cannot immediately name, an emotional residue that takes half the morning to trace back to its source.

I have a complicated relationship with dreams. As someone whose waking life involves a great deal of internal monitoring and regulation, the complete loss of that control during sleep is not always restful. Some nights, my dreams are simply the day's unfinished business, replayed with strange new cast members. Other nights, they feel like dispatches from parts of me that do not get much airtime during waking hours, younger, rawer, less managed versions of myself who apparently have things to say.

What I find genuinely fascinating from a neuroscience perspective is that the dreaming brain is not resting. It is actively consolidating memory, processing emotional experience, and making connections that the conscious mind is too busy or too defended to make during the day. In that sense, dreams are not interruptions to the work of being human. They are part of the work, happening without our interference, which is perhaps why they occasionally produce something true that we would never have arrived at deliberately.

I do not always remember my dreams. But when I do, I have learned to pay attention, not to interpret them too literally, but to notice what feeling they leave behind. That feeling is usually telling me something my waking self has been too preoccupied, or too afraid, to sit with.

#MastoPrompt #Dreams #Neuroscience #ActuallyAutistic #InnerWorld #AuDHD #NDCommunity #Writing