Dreams of No Dreams

My dreams stink. I pine for long nights of dark sleep and to wake with a fresh mind to start the day. Instead, I fall asleep and become any number of different personas who commit heinous acts all night and wake up in shock. I can't even call them nightmares because in my dreams I'm totally jazzed about ruining everything and everyone around me. I am often aware when dreaming that the situation doesn't represent reality and make a decision to go ahead and beat someone up or burn down a building because I know there are no repercussions. But in waking the full weight of my "actions" crushes me into tiny shards of guilt.

People say that in dreams you are unfettered. That the person in your dreams is still you, but without the social restrictions that govern us in waking. I really hope this isn't true. But in case it is, I thank my parents for giving me a sense of social responsibility and ethical roadmap otherwise I might have turned out like those things who run wild in my head at night. It's a disturbing thought.

I used to have real nightmares when I was a teenager. Terrifying dreams that I would wake from gasping. Later when I worked 8 hours a day in an office my dreams were boring but safe. I would dream that I was filing or answering phones all night than wake up and have to do it all again. It was annoying, but I would trade it any day for the stock of dreams I have now. Now I'm rarely Hollywood at night. I'm a maurading villain, soulless steward, sometimes even a really vicious animal but one thing holds true throughout each of these dreams - I'm despicable.

Luckily, no one really knows where dreams come from or what they mean. I'm scared to ever have a reliable method to interpret night visions lest I discover that I'm a terrible person at the core. My sister Annie was interested in the interpretation of dreams a few years ago and kept asking me to tell her my dreams so she could dissect them. I lied and told her that I couldn't remember my dreams because I didn't want her to worry about me.

Now that I've totally freaked everyone out, would someone please remind me that I'm not accountable for my dreams and that they don't mean anything because I can't get rid of the feeling that they do. It's no wonder I stay up all night watching VH1's Best Of rather than toddle off happily to bed. Should I circle my bed with garlic? Holy water? Thomas Kinkade snowglobes? Anything to stop these dreams!