Man, for a solid six months there, my partner was literally haunting my dreams. I mean, not in a scary way, but like, every single night. I’d wake up and sometimes I’d be honestly mad at them for something they did in the dream, but they never even did it! It was really starting to weird me out.
It got to the point where I was spending more mental time with ‘Dream-Partner’ than I was with the actual person sleeping right next to me. I’d be trying to figure out why Dream-Partner was suddenly selling our old car or why they changed the color of the living room walls to that awful lime green. I kept thinking I must be missing some huge signal, some deep, dark secret message my brain was trying to send me.
The Great Dream Capture Attempt
I decided to stop just letting it roll. I needed a record. This wasn’t some fancy research project, just me trying to quiet my head. I grabbed the cheapest notebook I could find—the kind with the thin paper—and put it and a pen right next to the bed. I told myself, no matter how tired or confused I was, the first thing I did when I woke up was write down whatever I could remember. Even if it was just one word.
This was harder than I thought.
- The first week, I just had scribbles. Things like: ‘Lake. Quiet. Partner fishing.’
- The second week, it was getting more detailed. I actually wrote sentences. ‘Partner standing in front of the fridge, but it wasn’t our fridge. They wouldn’t look at me. Kept reorganizing the butter.’
- The third week, I was waking up specifically to log this junk. I had a whole system. Date, time (if I woke up mid-dream), and a ‘Feeling’ score (1-5, 5 being totally freaked out).
I ended up with this thick book full of nonsense. I was looking for patterns, you know? Like, did they appear more often on Tuesdays? Was it always after I ate late-night pizza? Nothing obvious jumped out. The only constant was them. Always them.
The Tangent That Wasn’t Really a Tangent
Around the fourth week of this logging project, I was dealing with a huge mess at work. They suddenly switched up the whole project management system. I mean, they just dropped this complicated new thing on us without any warning. It caused pure chaos. Everyone was running around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to figure out how to log a simple expense report, let alone finish a big task. I was working until 10 PM every night just to keep my head above water.
I remember one night, I literally slept on the couch because I was too tired to make it upstairs. I woke up with a stiff neck and immediately grabbed the notebook. That night’s entry was a doozy: ‘Partner was trying to build a really complicated bookshelf with no instructions. I tried to help, but every piece I handed them was the wrong size. They got mad and threw a tiny little wooden peg at me.’
I stared at the page. My first thought was, ‘Why the heck is my partner mad at me about furniture?’ But then I looked at the entry right before it, and the one after. They were all about impossible tasks, about confusion, about getting mad over something simple.
The Big Pivot
I realized I had been reading the whole thing wrong. I was trying to decode them—what they wanted, what they were hiding. But the dreams weren’t about them at all. They were just the nearest, most trusted figure my brain could find to put into the weird mental simulation.
My partner wasn’t building a bookshelf. My brain was showing me my work situation. The bookshelf was the new, complicated work system. The missing instructions were the lack of training. My partner—the person I rely on and trust the most—was just the character my subconscious picked to represent the stress, the pressure, and the feeling of failure I had when dealing with that insane work change.
I literally went back through the whole damn log with a new eye. I stopped asking, “What does my partner doing X mean?” and started asking, “What real-life problem does my partner doing X represent?”
- ‘Partner suddenly singing karaoke really badly’ became: ‘My fear of failing the public presentation next week.’
- ‘Partner driving a broken-down lawnmower on the highway’ became: ‘My anxiety about how slow the mortgage refinance paperwork is moving.’
- ‘Partner sitting silently on a giant stack of dirty laundry’ became: ‘My guilt about ignoring the chores all week because of the work crunch.’
It was like a switch flipped. The dreams didn’t stop, but they stopped confusing me. Now, when I wake up and scribble down ‘Partner is trying to fix the leaky faucet with duct tape,’ I don’t panic about the plumbing. I know it means I’m stressed about trying to solve a big financial problem with a flimsy, short-term fix. They weren’t a mystery; they were just a damn convenient placeholder for every bit of baggage I was carrying around that day. It was almost a relief to realize it wasn’t a premonition—it was just my own stupid stress wearing a familiar face.
