I’ve been thinking about dreams lately — not the soft, drifting kind, but the ones that feel like they come from somewhere deeper. As a child I had night terrors and hypnagogic hallucinations, the kind that blur the line between waking and sleeping. Fear was a familiar visitor back then, and it often followed me into my dreams.
The hypnagogic hallucinations didn’t disappear when childhood ended. Even in my twenties I would sometimes wake up screaming, caught between sleep and waking, unsure which world I was in. It was as if those early fears had learned how to follow me, even when I thought I’d outgrown them.
One of the strongest themes in my dreams has always been water. I’ve had at least five tsunami dreams over the years. In every one, the wave rises impossibly high, swallowing the horizon, and I have to find a way to escape. And somehow, I always do. I survive. I get out. Even when the dream feels overwhelming, there’s a part of me that keeps moving. In my dreams/nightmares I used to run when the water was sucked back.
I look back on these dreams now with a kind of quiet understanding. They don’t feel like warnings or leftover fear anymore. They feel like reflections of how I’ve moved through my life — sometimes frightened, sometimes unsure, but always finding a way forward. The wave rises, the ground shifts, the world tilts, and still I move. Maybe that’s the thread running through all of it: even when the tide pulls back, I don’t freeze. I run. I survive. I keep going.