Or did I dream I had one?
Asking for a friend (who is also me, but sleeping)
A philosophical investigation into recurring nightmares, temporal paradoxes, and why Christopher Nolan probably sleeps just fine.
By Me, Allegedly·A few nights ago. Or was it last night? 4 min read (if awake)
For the past several nights, I have been having the same dream. At least, I think I have. The problem — and bear with me here, because this gets slippery fast — is that last night’s dream may simply have been a dream about having the same dream. Which raises the question: have I been trapped in a nightmare loop, or have I been dramatically overreacting to a single bad Tuesday?
Both outcomes are, frankly, on brand for me.
“What if the real recurring dream was the anxiety we made along the way?”
Let me walk you through the evidence, as I have assembled it each morning while standing in the kitchen in my dressing gown, staring into a coffee cup like a detective who has completely lost the plot.
💭 Night 1 — The Original Incident
A dream occurs. Frustrating. Details murky. The kind of dream where you’re trying to do something simple — pack a bag, send an email, locate your own front door — and nothing cooperates. I wake up mildly annoyed. Normal Tuesday energy.
💭 Night 2 — Escalation
Another dream. Very similar vibe. I wake up convinced it’s the same dream again. Or is this the first time I’m having it? Hard to say. The brain, it turns out, is a terrible archivist.
💭 Night 3 — The Twist
A dream in which I am aware that I keep having this dream. A meta-dream. A dream wearing a dream’s trench coat. Inception has been achieved and I did it alone, in my own bedroom, for free.
Now here is where it gets philosophically thorny, and where I begin to understand why Descartes was such poor company at parties. If Night 3’s dream was about having a recurring dream, it would have felt exactly the same as actually having one. There is no way to tell the difference from the inside. I am, in essence, unreliable narrator of my own unconscious.
The more I think about it, the more I believe this has genuine cinematic potential. Picture it: a thriller in which the protagonist slowly realises they cannot trust their own dream memory. Are they in a loop? Or just catastrophising at 3am? The tension builds. The soundtrack is unsettling. There is almost certainly a shot of someone waking up, gasping, in a cold sweat — probably several times, to really hammer the point home.
“I have, in my own bedroom, accidentally invented the premise of a £200 million film. Without the budget. Or the cast. Or the ending.”
Working title: Same Dream, Different Night. Or possibly Was That Yesterday. Or, if we’re going full art house: The Recurring (Maybe).
In any case, I am choosing to interpret all of this not as a symptom of stress, but as evidence that my subconscious is a creative powerhouse simply waiting to be optioned by a major streaming platform. If anyone from Netflix is reading this — and statistically, someone from Netflix is reading everything on the internet at any given moment — my agent will be in touch. I don’t have an agent. But in one of my dreams, I might.
Sweet dreams. Or the memory of them. Or the dream of the memory.
You know what, just sleep well.
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