Skin and water

I've always had trouble sleeping. Falling asleep is a challenge, staying alseep is a challenge. Not dreaming is impossible. No matter how tired I am dreams are always there.

Last fall I started taking sleeping pills because the sleeping problems were getting to be too much. Now I'm trying not to take them and the only thing I can do is just accept whatever happens when I try to sleep. There's no sense in fighting it anymore.

Needless to say, the past few weeks have been quite interesting. I've always had vivid dreams but these ones have certainly been far more surreal than what I've experienced in the past few months.

Exhibit A:

On Thursday I was dreaming that each day was going in fast-forward motion. In my dream I would wake up and the day would just fly by and then it would be the next and the next and the next. And every day I was losing weight and losing weight, so much that my skin started hanging. And then I was so thin that my skin was becoming translucent; it was hanging there like thin plastic and I could just peel it off in clear, thin layers.

Why is this in my head? No idea.

What does it mean? According to Experiencefestival.com, "Peeling skin represents a sloughing off of the old in order to make way for the new."

I feel like that's definitely something that I'm currently going through.

Exhibit B:

Last night I had one of the most intense nightmares of my life. I woke up and was actually scared - my heart was pounding. In this dream I'd moved to this town for work and had been set up in this little house by a lake. At first everything seemed fine, but then I started seeing someone coming out of the lake. He was actually walking right out of the water.

Then I started getting weird messages left on my phone. They were always in whispers:

I can see what you're doing all the time.

I'm always right outside.

I would try to tell people what was going on and they would pretend like it was nothing. It turned out everyone in the town was a slave to this monster guy who lived in the lake. I called up my friends and had someone come to get me, but of course the lake guy killed them and then took me under the water. He had his own little world set up under there, and everyone from the town was there, too. It was a whole operation, and I was going to stay there with them forever.

What's the interpretation for something like this? DreamMoods.com says that water, "symbolizes your unconscious and your emotional state of mind. Water is the living essence of the psyche and the flow of life energy. It is also symbolic of spirituality, knowledge, healing and refreshment."

ExperienceFestival.com says that it has been believed that dreaming about being kidnapped is really an omen and that you will receive unexpected news and be successful against your opposition.