The Usual Stress Dream

November 14, 2026

Let me tell you about my dreams.

I wouldn't say I have nightmares every night. Not really. They're not quite at that level of intensity- I am not, usually, scared by them. But nonetheless there is a persistent characteristic that says that I must get out of there.

Why? It varies. Sometimes, sure, there's a monster that's hunting me. But more frequently, it'll be simple distaste for the location- usually I'm there because in the dream my parents still get to decide they're taking me someplace and I am not an adult and cannot offer protest, and I need to find a way to ditch them, leave the place, and reclaim agency. Occasionally, though, it's my fault entirely- I signed up to be someplace stressful and disquieting, for reasons that have entirely escaped me, leaving me with no choice but to lament my poor decision-making and wonder what the hell I was thinking.

The places I'm in are often not especially unpleasant- but they have this quality that I think is just an artifact of how working memory in dreams works: it can't render an entire self-consistent locale across multiple scenes. There'll often be a very strong sense of place that will convince me that the world makes sense right now, but I'll walk through a door and suddenly be someplace totally different that the dream will insist is the same place. Start in a fancy italian bistro, walk through an office building, step into a posh library in a mansion, continue on to a tropical beach... the dream will do its best to retroactively stitch these together into a "place" that I "am" and haven't "left" yet, but it's almost impossible to believe these shifting scenes were ever meant to be parts of a single location. It's clearly just making things up as it goes along.

The environment will also typically have a strong element of verticality. Stairs feature prominently, though often it's also ladders and drops and shifts in gravity and sequences of floating platforms, the geography of videogames invading my subconscious. There's a pervasive asymmetry to proceedings, as I can't perform the mental action of comparing one half of a space to another. Moving from one room to another is rarely as simple as walking from one flat bit of ground to the next, and as such it's near-impossible to form a clear mental floorplan of my environment. The map must be three-dimensional, and in any case it's a dream so any mental map will find itself inaccurate and useless as soon as I make any attempt to reference it.

And the rules of the world... they vary, but always, always, something is happening. I am never in a quiet place, or an empty place, or a place where people are just going about their day-to-day lives. There is an EVENT! A natural disaster, a search for an intruder, a life-and-death game! Perhaps the Monster is about! The situation is not the way it normally is- something strange and artificial is animating everyone, and I often find myself confused by the fervor they're gripped by and whether I ought to be sharing in it.

Let's speak now of the inhabitants of these dreams. The people I'm interacting with, the ones animated by these strange rules.

Actually, "interacting with" is the wrong word. As often as I'll have my own viewpoint, I'll be thrust into someone else's- a new main character whose inner world is superimposed on my own and demands my attention. The camera is ever-shifting, as are my priorities and the rules I'm following. "I" often disappear, only to pop back up someplace disoriented and unsure of how I was involved in what just happened.

But nevertheless there is usually a cast. Those populating my dreams, when they're not plainly antagonists, are typically positioned as my peers. There'll be a lot of them, often in the same boat as I am, albeit reacting to it in different ways. It hearkens back to my time at school or camp as a kid- a situation where most of the people around me are on the same level as I am, just as forced by circumstance into the place they've found themselves in. What we're doing will transform from moment to moment, social context and genre of story shapeshifters that can't be pinned down- but we're a Group. This may not make them natural allies, exactly- I'm almost always on the outside of whatever cliques they form, acting as an observer- but we occupy the same world and have roughly the same concerns. Rarely do I meet an authority figure, or a subordinate, or even really an enemy. We're all in this together. There's something... if not comfortable, at least correct-feeling about it. It's the way I always faintly wish things were.

As for who they are? If the rooms shift behind me as I pass, so do the faces. The cast is enormous and mutable, and rarely will a single figure maintain an identity for more than a scene or two. Nonetheless as the cast shifts, I will know, in my bones, that these people have been here the whole time- they're who the dream is about, this group of people and I making our way through this strange and foreign land, even if the Kamrusepa leading our party was Jimmy Neutron a moment ago.

And I recognize them, of course. They're people I know, or know of. Characters from works of fiction I've read, placed in my reality as though they were real people all along and we just haven't had the chance to meet until now. Book characters or internet friends, who never had a face until now but now present themselves to me embodied, never quite looking like how I expected. Often someone will look like some highly recognizable fictional character, but I'll know- no, that's not Gimli, that's my friend Alice from the internet whose face I've never seen, who I guess happens to look like Gimli even though as best I'm aware she's never owned an axe.

No matter where I am or who I'm with, though- I need to leave. It's too much, to be dealing with all this right now. I need to go somewhere else, to cool down or recharge my social battery. (Plus, sometimes there's the Monster, which is Coming For Me, and who will always find itself imminently upon me the moment I recall its existence.) Staying in one place and allowing the walls and faces to solidify is never an option- something urgent calls me away. The basic action of my dream is to find an exit and escape.

So.

I think I've ably described my usual dreams, now. You get the picture. Maybe you even recognize something familiar in it.

Can you imagine what it would be like to be in a situation like this, for real? It'd be incredibly disorienting and more than a little stressful. And multiple times a day, every day, you would get this strong felt impression that this is a dream. It's just like all your other dreams! You figure out whether you're dreaming by comparing the world to what you remember about reality, and if the world is a chaotic shifting mess of unfamiliar familiar faces and frantic nervous energy and eclectic fantastical architecture, that means- hey! You're asleep! Change the dream- or wake up, because by the time you have this sort of self-awareness it usually means you're oversleeping or your alarm is about to go off!

But you'd hit that point and attempt to mentally right yourself and open your eyes, and it just wouldn't work. The dream would keep going. Every hour or so you'd smack into the invisible window glass like a bird and fail to push through it. You'd wonder, perhaps, if you were losing your mind.

...Anyway, making meta posts about Inkhaven is discouraged, so let's say this isn't about that.