I believe that my slow descent into madness has sped up. I have always had dreams that were so “real” that I experience disorientation upon waking. Usually these dreams involve some sort of struggle with a much more powerful force. Sadly, although I can remember that I had been dreaming, I can’t remember many details. There are usually a few highlights that stick prominently into my memory, but they are distorted and don’t make much sense. I was only mildly concerned when the frequency of these dreams increased. I was much more concerned when the disorientation period increased in length.

Today though, was something beyond all previous “real” dream experience. As the dream starts, I find myself in a crowded hallway. Instinctively I recognize it as a school. This is slightly odd because the ages of the student body runs the gamut of life. A woman comes up and hands me an envelope of pictures. In the pictures are images of myself in situations that “might have been” in this life had things gone slightly different in my younger years. There are pictures of me dressed up in gray sweat-clothes with a gray face-mask over my eyes and a Mohawk hairstyle. Apparently these were part of a comedy routine that I am doing on an amateur level. There are pictures of a small girl, of about 4 years old, that is dressed up similarly to me. I found out later that she is my daughter.

At this point in the dream I started to refuse the details of the dream because they are wrong. I find myself walking along a fence approximately 50 yards off the two-lane highway with a group of “friends”. While I am walking with my friends, we are discussing my reaction to the pictures. My friends don’t seem overly bothered about my reaction. It is almost like they have gone through it before. At this point a few more friends see us from the other side of the highway, and ask us to wait while they cross.
I don’t remember there being any traffic until they started to cross. The first friend makes it across. The second friend crosses the first lane and stops in the middle of the second with his back turned toward the semi that is suddenly barreling down the road. As I watch my friend get smashed into incredibly small bits that rain down on us, I simultaneously notice that there are more semis coming down the road. The second semi swerves off the road in its successful attempt to smash into the first friend that crossed. The next 4 semis fishtail in such a way that they begin to roll lengthwise toward the rest of us. Right before I woke, I either heard someone say or thought to myself, “You dumb-ass, why couldn’t you be happy with this new life? Isn’t it what you want?”

Even though I know that this was a dream, upon waking, I immediately felt as if I had been watching one of my parallel lives from another timeline. And then with the same certainty, I realized that all of my “real” dreams felt like parallel lives.

I have always felt that losing my sanity was not a matter of if, but more of when. I have been awake for more than an hour now, and am still haunted by this damn dream and the ideas that it represents. What if I am causing something important to unravel by recognizing the wrongness of these “real” dreams? What if this is actually more than paranoid delusions? My scientist aspect wants to brush all this off as my fantasy, but my chimpanzee and my artist aspects insist and demand that this is important and not to ignore it.

A quick note: I don't have any children, but want to be a father. I had considered going into comedy at one point in my life. I am currently doing online schooling to learn the skills necessary to make educational software.

For centuries, philosphers have been debating whether our dreaming lives are as real as, or more real than, what we consider to be our waking lives.

In some cultures, the dream world is considered to be real.

There is no way to determine if this is true or not, and there is no way to truly determine if you are living a parallel life in an alternate reality.

The important thing is that you are able to function in this world.

It would be a problem, if for example, you thought you could jump off a high building in waking life because your other "self" would still be alive and uninjured in the "other" world.

Think of it this way - you do the things that you have to do to get by in this world and the other "you" does the things they need to do to get by when they are in their world - if such a world exists.

The part of the dream where you start to refuse the details of the dream because they are wrong sounds like a glimmer of lucid dreaming.

There is a psychological condition called derealization where the waking world appears to be dreamlike, and it is hard to distinguish the waking world from the dream world. It is a type of dissociative disorder and can be caused by trauma, abuse or drug use.

Thank you

Thank you for your interpretation. I see that my fear that I might be losing my grip on reality is not unfounded.