[Espy]

Most of my dreams can get pretty disturbing. I dreamed about guns a lot as a kid/teenage. Was pretty odd, considering I absolutely hated shooter games until college.

Some of the stuff I remember (with content warnings for like... violence, death, suicide, all that fun jazz):

- Earliest dream I can remember involved saving cats from a factory that exploded into lava, and then I got trapped in a stairwell by the flames.

- Couple of dreams involving... being chased in an unlit corporate building. Person chasing me had a gun. Or had my parents as hostages.

- Another early-ish dream had me as a kid waiting to be picked up after school, and this guy jumps out of a car and starts shooting at me. I ran across a bridge, and... I think I might have died in that dream

- One of my most disturbing ones was me sitting in the room I kind of grew up in (at least for around a year) and cleaning an old-school pistol, then for some reason, put the pistol to my head, almost on a whim, and pulled the trigger. This one's gotten more and more disturbing over the years, especially after my depression diagnosis.

- There was one where... I'm not sure what I must have done, but apparently I got locked up for... a while. And when I got out, I was still more or less a kid, and everyone I knew shunned me and I found notes and articles and things saying I was a murderer. This dream was pretty crippling for younger Espy.

- There was at least one dream where I was running from assailants and for some reason had involved my twin, and I was the reasons she died. (I did have a twin IRL. She died when we were a month old.)

- There were a couple less disturbing firearms dreams that were a combination of zombies, LARPing, and me being a badass sniper.

- There was this one time a few years back (a few months before my depression diagnosis) where I took a nap and got trapped in seemingly never-ending false awakenings. I counted at least twenty. I was scared I'd never wake up.

- There are a LOT more guilt-tripping dreams, and I can't remember right now, nor can I be assed to remember. Maybe I will, later. At some point.

EDIT: Ah, yes, the dream that I was talking to a friend about today, also content warning for basically the same things as above:

This one happened several weeks ago. So, my biggest fear isn't dying. That comes pretty close, but mostly because I don't want to... cease existing, and cease doing things. My actual biggest fear, though, is... hm. How do I put this...

Losing the things that make me, me. Personality, memories. Brain processes. Empathy. Control over my own actions; being forced to do things that I normally wouldn't do.

So, of course, I had a dream where I was locked in... a stall? And my mom was working with scientists and they were planning an experiment that would get rid of... I guess, undesirable parts of my personality. I've stuffed this dream in the far corner of my mind for so long that I can no longer remember exactly what it was that they were trying to do.

And in the dream, I knew the clock was ticking and I just... couldn't let that happen to me. I'd rather cease to exist than to go through life being... not me. So I somehow broke out of the lab and had to sneak through the hotel that was acting as the front, trying to not draw attention from hotel guests all while evading the guards that were trying to capture me.

...Anyways. Yeah. That dream fucked me up for a couple weeks.