Dreams are great. In a dream you can find an ideal world where every minute detail you can see is stunningly beautiful; you can imagine you are with people who won’t discard you or do cruel things, where you can communicate from the heart, where you can find solace and peace - and it is so real that you don’t even realise you’re dreaming.

Nightmares can be harrowing, especially nightmares haunted by human monsters, but during the past year or so I don’t remember having many such night terrors. The only negative dreams I remember in recent times have been where I’ve been gripped with an agonising feeling of loss, of someone I care about disappearing or dying, or of being rejected.

I had a dream yesterday where I’d found myself a girlfriend. She wasn’t the most objectively gorgeous woman I’ve ever seen, but was very attractive to me. Now, I don’t know if it’s possible to feel any kind of actual love for a dream character… but the emotions I remember feeling were incredibly strong, a vivid affection that I knew was mutual and total acceptance. It’s strange how time works in a dream, because it seemed almost as if I had spent days on this one journey through a world of countryside landscapes and cityscapes and ruins, completely lost but not really caring. Obviously I wasn’t consciously aware that this girl was a projection of my deep subconscious or whatever, and believed her to be a real woman --- until I woke up, feeling dejected to realise I’d been asleep the whole time. But the main point is that there was evidently “time” for me to build up a vivid “bond” with this amazingly real dream creation.

A lot of the dream involved the two of us overcoming various problems, fighting some nasty enemies, running from some other enemies (like huge tank-things with spinning discs full of spikes on them), and discussing our odd situation together. Oh, and her appearance actually changed slightly as time went on, features like her hair colour and eyes changing colour, her skin tone getting slightly lighter, her face changing in subtle ways… Again, I don’t know how long I was actually dreaming all this, but the trek we were on seemed to go on forever.

The dream began to get more sensual and sexual when we found this old abandoned mansion – it looked like something from ancient Rome, with huge steps leading up to the entrance, with pillars on each side. It was dusk in the dream-world by then, and we were “taking refuge” there (we seemed to know by some odd intuition or dream-logic that it would be a safe-haven).

We found this strange room with a kind of oval dip indented into the floor, almost like a shallow swimming pool with no water in it. The floor itself was extremely strange – it looked like stone in some places, marble in others, but it was soft like one of those mattresses with memory-foam that you sink down into with the weight. There were windows of coloured glass, with eerie dusk light coming from them, and red drapes. There were also all kinds of strange “devices” along all the walls – what these contraptions all did, I never got to find out.

Anyway, the dream turned very sensual and very sexual at this point. It started out that we were just going to camp here “until the morning” (whenever that meant, in dreamtime), just lie in this strange dip in the ground and cuddle up for comfort. But that’s where a whole new section of the dream opened up.

My dream girl turned out to be very kinky (which really means my own mind’s kinkiness, of course) and we explored all kinds of things. There wasn’t much that we didn’t do. Where all the various toys and other paraphernalia came from, for example, I have no idea. I think the continuity and logical credibility of the dream was sacrificed for the sake of eroticism. We both came several times in the dream, and I came at least once in real life as I found when I woke up. I thought my days of these occurrences were behind me – I had a lot of them in my teens. There was no problem of being “pent up” in that way on this occasion, so I don’t know what brought this on.

Anyway, I am not complaining or worrying about anything here - it was a very cool dream. This is what I imagine it will be like in the future when virtual reality is perfected and mass-produced, and makers of erotica or pornography start using the technology. Except in their case, they won’t be likely to build up and evoke such strong emotions by constructing such an elaborate story and tapping into the subconscious.

At times I wish I could sleep forever. Life would be less stressful and less wrenching than it is at times. I know it’s my fault, this extremely autistic personality of mine, me avoiding everything and everyone I find difficult, hurting people because my social sensitivity or ability is not as it should be… but a lot of the time I think the real world is too harsh. Dying is no kind of answer because you need a brain and a mind to dream. Besides, death is terrifying because there is no way to rationally comprehend not existing anymore. At least sometimes I think so.

Oh well. Chin up.

(There are plenty other dreams out there…)