Is This For Real?

(I woke from a dream, but was I asleep

How did I get here, why are my legs so weak

Bare foot on a dirt road, damp breeze on my face, I can’t bare it

Imagination or madness again, the spirits they call, wanting all my pain

Raw paranoia, or fear, is this real, I can’t feel it

Just close your eyes, am I alone

Are you with me this time, I do not know

Don’t trust my mind, I do not trust them

Is this for real, don’t know where I have been

Need you even more than ever before

Reality slipping, on diagonal floors

Thoughts are all blurring, why did I want to be left alone?

Close your eyes, just pretend you’re blind

The laughter will stop, the strangers won’t mind

Children are pushing, the corpses sing

Is this for real, don’t know where you’ve been

Don’t know where you’ve been

Chemical madness, this path I walk home

Holding my hand, you are myself I know)

…

This was a journal entry I wrote back before I discovered the medication that worked for my brain. I would sometimes believe I was dreaming when I wasn’t. Seeing things that only would appear in a dream. Talking with people that were actually there as well as talking with people that weren’t. Seeing, hearing, and feeling very scary things while I was still awake and not realizing that I was not dreaming and couldn’t wake up. Finding myself at locations unfamiliar and thinking I was kidnapped. Not knowing how I got there and how long I had been gone from my home. Times when I did not even know if I myself were real or if I was in someone else’s dream. And worst, forgetting who I was all together. Sometimes, all I could feel was an invisible static mist on my skin and inside my body. Disappearing instantly when I heard a loud sound or a drastic change in temperature. Alarmingly shocking. As it hammered through me.

I can’t tell you the leagues of paranoid trauma and self crisis I had in my late teens and early twenties when all this started. I had chose to keep it a secret from everyone in my life to the extent that I eventually ended up in a mental ward with some seriously disturbed individuals. It was quite literally transitioning from one type of nightmare circus to another. The poem above is one of the tame entries.

I am greatful though that episodes like this didn’t happen all the time (and VERY lucky). Otherwise I probably would have eventually walked off a building, stepped in front of a car, or walked into a river and not even realized it. The one thing I figured out (far later) is that the episodes only happened when I was extremely bored and not doing anything for a long period of time. The whole “idle hands” idiom.

I still hallucinate like I once did. However, the meds make it so I can tell. And I am almost always busy doing something. So those states of non-reality are far and in between normal day to day life. Also, being way older kinda makes those rare moments, entertaining.