Dreams of blood and sugar

I have been experiencing the most vivid and disturbing dreams lately. I feel sucked into a strange world each night where all the darkest things within me reside. I have always enjoyed dreaming and I record my dreams when I can in my dream journal. But the last couple of nights I have been dreaming of blood. At first the dream seems so innocuous. I am trying to find games to play with children that I am looking after and then the dream turns into a search for items to be used in a ritual. I see a man with a long beard pour blood into bowls of sugar and then he begins to eat it. I am disgusted, repulsed, but fascinated as well and I can't look away. And everywhere in the dream, on the walls, and on the floors, I see strange markings. The man calmly looks at me and continues to eat.

Then last night I am dreaming that I am in a sterile white office, a doctor's office, there are so many people in there, too many for one single visit. I am watching as this woman is being told she has to have a blood test because she is diseased. I stare, again fascinated and unable to look away, as she tries to understand what the nurse is telling her, that she could have HIV and they need to draw blood to run a test. I watch as the blood is taken out of her and put into a glass bottle, not a tube, but a large bottle. The blood is red, it's roiling with clots, moving in the bottle as if it were alive, and the woman is asking how soon will she know the results. I turn away from her and there seated at another end of this white office is a man I know. He's from school. He's smiling at me and I at him. He just appeared there and just as quickly disappeared. He had no part to play in the dream, he had no reason to be there. He simply was there. As if my mind pulled him out of his sleep and deposited him in my dream for the briefest of seconds and then he was gone.

I can always tell when my dream is not a dream such as in that instance with that person. I can usually tell when my dream is just a dream and when I become aware of it then all bets are off. I can do whatever I want, fly if I wish, have sex with whoever I wish, stretch out my hand and change all the world around me. If I dreamed I was holding a rose in my hand and if when I woke up I actually had a rose in my hand would I then think that the dream was still happening or would that be the proof that my dream world and my waking world are in fact one and the same and I can do whatever I wish? When the dreams become nightmares I am powerless to stop them. All I can do is wipe them from my mind. I want to uncover what my mind keeps hidden from me.

Sometimes it is safer to live in the dream than it is out here. As long as you know it is just a dream and you can always change it when it doesn't go your way. But then again you can do that out here too. Hmmmm..........strange worlds we live in.