On three separate occasions last night, I dreamed that I was screaming. Screaming, other people around, no one looks up. No one seems to notice even when I’m looking right at them.

I woke up after the second dream, which seemed to immediately follow the first, and placed a hand over my rapidly beating heart in order to let the rhythm lull me back to sleep. I awoke after the third dream surprised to find myself on the other side of the bed.

There’s a lot on my mind.

I am reminded of that when I wake up and all is quiet with the exception of whatever happens to be going on in my head. I live near a highway and you can faintly hear it above the white noise of the fan, but you could just as easily ignore it. Sometimes the dog who lives upstairs pads around, nails scratching on the floor. It only bothers me when something else is already bothering me.

I don’t have nightmares very often, but I’m a lucid dreamer (admittedly of the self-diagnosed variety) when I do. I am clearly making decisions, thinking about something else in the background, and I make the choice to wake up. In that sense, it’s a bit like knowing you’re going to fall when lead climbing – you move towards the next clip and as you’re reaching, you know you’ll miss. It gives you just enough time to call, “Falling!” to your partner. Lucid dreaming gives me just enough time to decide to wake.

What settled me back to sleep was not having woken from the dream itself but for admitting fear, uncertainty, a sense of moving without seeing into something resembling outer space. I say resembling because it’s not the kind of space you imagine when you’re young. It’s almost like moving under water into a blackness that folds, expands, contracts, shifts in colour and form.

It is not of this world.

And I think that’s the part that my senses do not like. There is a feeling of moving within something that I don’t understand and that my brain cannot easily classify.

Yes, this is right.

And I know it because as I write this, I find myself smiling.

There’s a world out there that may or may not be real, and it’s a world that I want to know and explore. But it’s the dubiety of this that leaves my mind playing with possibilities, and these possibilities do not fit easily into boxes.

There is also, however, a desire to have a single answer to a litany of questions.

This is impossible and it’s no wonder I’m screaming.