For the past few years, I’ve been dealing with an increasing number of dreams. For a lot of my life, I didn’t really dream much aside from a few repeats. I had one when I was younger about being swallowed by a blanket that showed up every time I got sick (our family called this specific blanket “the sick blanket” since, as little kids, we got bundled cosily into it when we weren’t feeling well), a weird warped-perspective dream about being a tiny dot that couldn’t move around my parents house every time I got sick after I was ten or eleven, and some weird tons-of-armies-fighting-a-giant-war dreams that were basically my imaginary play games given life and ridiculous scale by my sleeping mind. I’m sure I had other dreams from time to time, but I really didn’t have many and it was only in high school that I realized that most people dream much more frequently. These days, though I still don’t dream often, I now have about as many dreams a month as I used to have in a year. Generally speaking, they’re a much wider variety these days, having replaced the old “got stuck in high school as an adult somehow” anxiety dreams of my college years and early twenties with a much greater breadth of mental fiction. Unfortunately, this uptick in dreams coincides with me starting to finally process the trauma of my childhood and so most of my dreams since then have a dual attachment to my present and something I’m working through or have mostly worked through from my past. It’s kind of exhausting, to be frank, but I try to stay focused on it being a good sign that my mind is actively healing from the stuff I went through as a child.