2005-07-08 - 1:02 p.m.

For the past two weeks or so, I've dreamt that the telephone was ringing, and I've woken with a start, filled with the kind of dread that only a midnight phone call can beget. It's annoying and a little troubling - exactly why am I hallucinating phantom phone calls? What is my mind trying to tell me that necessitates suddenly waking me up at five A.M.?

I've often been haunted by a rich dream life and a fear of madness. "Real Life" places, in my dreams, are transposed into familiar though utterly different surroundings, always with a detatched pallor of melancholy (this is a melancholy associated with the feeling that the story has ended, yet still continues, or at least that's the closest I can come to putting it in words.) If a "real life" place turns up in a dream, it will be the same the next time I dream about it, and the more I dream about it, the more detailed it will be. I could draw a complex map of dream-Kennebunk at this point.

Twice in my life, I've had coincidentially prophetic dreams - once, when I was in middle school, I dreamt that Kurt Cobian had overdosed on sleeping pills and alcohol (I was a huge Nirvana fan, as were many of us back then), and then when I woke up, I read in the paper that he had (Obviously, he lived, but not for long afterwards). And once, I dreamt very clearly of a place I had no name for, but which I found out, years later, was the campus of Simon's Rock. Coincidences like these tend to wobble my slightly unbalanced psyche, leading to the fear that I might someday go completely mad.

I've certainly had my struggles with depression, but although depression tends to skew one's view of the world, it does not destroy it. For a long time, I've worried that I am on the verge of snapping and completely losing touch with reality, even though there's no history of madness in my family, and if I didn't go crazy during my turbulent teenage years, I probably won't now. Maybe what I have is more of a generalized hypochondria, exascerbated by the experience of growing up as somewhat of an outcast, already thinking that others view me as "crazy".

So little things - being constantly awoken by a nonexistent phone, a sense of disoritentation in crowds, fixation on the fear of going mad, make me wonder. Not worry, per se, but curiously wonder - is this the "big one"? Have I finally snapped?

I've had too much education and read too much into things.