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Hi

~rrraksamam

I've been having these strange dreams about my childhood and school days for a few months now.

Initially, they started out as me hanging out with a couple of my old friends, doing random stuff.

But now, most of them are about exams. In them, I don't know the subject, I haven't prepped for them, and I'm usually in panic/anxiety mode.

I don't know what these dreams mean. But I feel like they mean something - something that I haven't figured out yet.

I'll be 35 years old soon. I'm old. I feel old. I finished school a long time ago. I had a few friends but we never kept in touch.

My life is boring. I work, come home, prep a meal, eat, watch a movie or listen to some music, browse the web, and go to sleep.

I have no friends, no girlfriend or wife. I have a brother who checks up on me from time to time, and a sister who I see once in a year.

I'm an introvert. I don't know what I'm doing with my life. I'm just winging it by the day.

I don't have much long to live. 15 years, give or take. I don't want to grow old and die. I've taken care of old people. I've witnessed the miserable and painfully slow death that occurs at old age. I don't want that. I'd prefer to die when I'm still in control of my mind and body. Besides, I don't have anyone who'd take care of me when I'm too old.

I'm afraid of death. But I know there's no escape.

This is my life in a nutshell.

I don't like talking about myself. I don't like sharing about myself with strangers. Stranger is danger.

I feel stuck. I don't feel enlightened. My other dreams are about my past - people from my past, places I'd been to in the past, things that happened in the past, and things that I wish had happened in the past. None of them make total sense.

Am I alone in this? Has anyone else experienced something similar? Or different? Does anyone have some answers?

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Replies

~axiom wrote (thread):

Am I alone in this? Has anyone else experienced something similar? Or different? Does anyone have some answers?

You are not alone in these concerns.

However, any answers anyone may provide would ultimately prove to be answers specific to their own variations of these questions.

And that's about as generic a solution as possible: you have your questions, answer them.

...

As unhelpfully self-evident or quasi-tautological as that may seem, it helps to consider it as a reminder instead of a solution.

A reminder that your answers can be as fantastical or practical as you'd like them to be; a reminder that the answers you come up with need not be based in some widespread consensus; a reminder that the 'coming up with answers' part is as much a solution as any answer you may eventually settle on.

As an introvert myself--often sharing in your experience of anachronous school-day dreams and the anxieties of aging in isolation--I find the exercise of creation and the community that it tends to cultivate to be the most effective remedies.

Of course, these aren't remedies for the concerns themselves (neither the dreams nor the helplessness of aging); rather, they are remedies for my inability to cease obsession over them. Simply put, they are effective distractions.

(As the parent lives on in their children, and the artist lives on in their work, the restless live best in effective distraction.)

And, for what its worth, my perspective on death is that I'd much rather it catch me by surprise, while I'm effectively distracted, than me counting each day spent as but another step toward its inevitability.

...

tl;dr: immersive distractions, particularly of the creative kind (producing artefacts as 'ideal children') that allow one to channel ones past into the present with future-potential, offer a decent home-remedy for existential angst; at least, that's the change in my pocket.

~inquiry wrote (thread):

There are as many ways to say it as there are selves hiding from it, each having the common component of said self needing to go.

Find the way to say it that seemingly works for the you that needs to go, i.e. that improves the odds of it (i.e. the model/re-present-ation of "you") being let go of without the sense of a self having done it....