On Dreams

Whatever is actually happening, it’s beyond human comprehension.

Jul 13, 2025

Row row row your boat gently down the stream.

Merrily merrily merrily merrily, life is but a dream.

Life is but a dream…

I had my fair share of nightmares as a child, as we all do. There’s one in particular that has left me perplexed and with questions that are hard to answer.

The dream had slight variations in all of them, but this is the gist:

My family is taken away from me. A strange group of aliens take their place and parade around as them. I confront them with the truth that I know, which is that they are not my family, that I know who my real family is and they are not them. It’s so glaringly obvious that I do not belong to this strange band of creatures, but they gaslight me. They insist that this is how it always was and how it always will be. They act utterly astonished that anything could be any different.

Sometimes I see my real family on some kind of screen. It is bright where they are.

The grass is a vibrant green and the sky a vibrant blue filled with puffy white clouds. They look happy. It’s juxtaposed to the gray world I find myself in where everything is abrasive and uncomfortable. I know I’m supposed to be with them, but I can’t get to them.

It all feels so real.

Every time this happens, I believe that my family has been taken from me and I’m in some kind of alternate reality, the wrong reality, with no way of getting back.

I wake up at some point, usually sobbing and crying out for a family that I feel I have actually lost, in a world that thinks I’m crazy, but is actually itself insane.

There I am in my bed as tiny Kerry, in the only home I ever knew, with the only family I ever knew. My head swirls with confusion as the adjustment from that experience to this one is disorienting.

This was not a monster under the bed scenario. It was like some very deep, very visceral piece of my subconscious was screaming at me about something I had no awareness of in my waking life.

I don’t normally look too far into dreams, unless they’re repeating dreams. In my opinion, that’s when something is significant about them.

When I got older, I didn’t understand why I was having that particular dream. There was no reason for it. I was generally a happy child. I was sensitive, but also very trusting and loving of my family, even during the difficult parts. In fact, I remember feeling distinctly distrusting of everybody I knew, including extended family, except for my mom, dad, sister, and two brothers (and all animals, of course).

At some point I think my life became the nightmare and the scary dreams weren’t all that hard to manage anymore.

I think that flip happened slowly over time because I didn’t notice it. Tragically, what I have come to fear most is a good dream. Don’t get me wrong, the nightmares are unwelcome, but there is something particularly harmful about knowing exactly what life should be like, knowing exactly what love should be like, and knowing exactly what safety is like, and emerging into the antithesis of those things upon awakening.

Sometimes I think there’s a wound there I’m being protected from in order to carry out this life uninfluenced. Beneath many layers of logic, human ego, learned behaviors, learned beliefs, amnesia, and false identity is a painful sense of homesickness, and an unfathomable well of loneliness.

It wasn’t until I became a young adult, around the age of 18/19, that I began to feel and think things that would justify a dream like the one I was having in my early childhood.

I started to feel very alien towards everyone, as if the path I found myself on was entirely separate from everyone else’s whether I liked it or not, and no matter what I did to avoid it. I couldn’t ignore it anymore, how wrong everything and everyone felt. What I saw was everyone living for themselves and nothing else, and that being the valued standard. I tried to prove myself wrong about this, and still do sometimes, but to my dismay, I am proven right about the abrasive nature of this world and the abysmal truth of the human pathology time and time again. Now in 2025, I wonder how many holocausts it will take for the human race to change, or if this is the place in the Universe that never changes. I don’t know.

When I was in college, some time around 2014, I stumbled upon the work of Dolores Cannon, an investigative hypnotherapist. Back in the 60’s, hypnotherapy became a popular tool to help people overcome things like smoking, obesity, anxiety, etc.

Something strange would happen with certain patients where they would talk about lives they never had or speak in languages they didn’t know. Most therapists wrote this off as nonsense and navigated the patient away from this space, except for people like Dolores Cannon. She made it her life’s work to investigate this phenomenon and developed a technique to get these people to explore this space in a safe way.

A lot of the patients that sought her out expressed that they couldn’t explain why, but they felt like their life was a mistake. They found what was considered normal to every day life strange and abrasive. As hypnotherapy became a last ditch effort for many, her clients would struggle with feeling like they didn’t want to live this life anymore, even when they had loving families and successful careers. It was the first time I encountered people expressing similar feelings I was having. I didn’t know that many others were out there going through the same internal struggle as mine, and it was an enormous comfort to know that at least I wasn’t alone in that.

What Dolores eventually discovered was that these were volunteer souls. They left their lives and their existences to be on Earth at a time of grave need. They didn’t need to do anything extraordinary, just exist and be exceptions to the rule. They came here to be among people, and ironically came to detest being around people.

There is so much of her work that would take me months to relay here. Instead, I will leave you with this.

If everything she uncovered is valid and true, this life really is but a dream. It’s not just an allegory or a metaphor or a fun play on words.

Play with the idea that this life is just one chapter in a vast infinite tapestry that is eternally unfolding. It’s multidimensional and multi-universal. It contains everything you can and can’t imagine. Whatever is actually happening, it’s beyond human comprehension. Be humbled by it—but please, dare to dream a different dream. For all our sakes.