I keep dreaming that I’m alone inside Lone Fir Cemetery at night. It is raining and behind me the road is dark and wet and it goes deeper into the forest. When I look ahead I see the way out. There is a light there and I walk and walk but I never get through the gate. I can’t orient myself between the gate and the darkness behind me, and so it feels like I am never moving. Sometimes I turn around and start walking towards the darkness. It keeps on raining and I don’t hear anything or think anything. None of this bothers me. If I hit a lucid state, and I know I am in a dream cemetery, then it is always my wish that I never have to leave it because of how comfortable and safe I feel there.

In the real world I will have intentionally set my alarm several hours before I actually need to be awake, and so when it goes off I am flung out of the dream cemetery and back into my bedroom. If I don’t feel like waking up, and I hardly ever do, then I will hit snooze and go to another dream. I’ll repeat this process dozens of times—one dream after another, separated by nine real-world minutes. Sometimes the dreams are very short and sometimes they are very long.

It is a safe bet that once I leave the cemetery I will end up in some other place that I know well. Usually it is my grandmother’s condo in my hometown. I wake up on the couch in my pajamas. Outside there is four feet of snow on the ground and it is still coming down hard. I search the apartment for my grandmother but I can’t find her in any of the rooms. I open the front door and a pile of snow floods into the entryway and I use the door to push it out again. Once I know for sure that I am alone, I start building a fire.

I really did live like this for six weeks last December, and so my dream is an amalgamation of all those weeks condensed into one sad day. Sometimes I know this when I am dreaming and sometimes I don’t. I can’t remember which one is worse.

I dream about people too. Usually these dream people are gone forever. I dream about my friend in Baltimore and my friend in New Orleans. I dream about my friends in Nokesville who are no longer alive. I miss all these people very much. This is the only way I get to see and talk to them anymore.

Strange, then, that when I wake up from all this, and I go walking around real places and talking to all the real people there, I can’t get any of it to feel as real as my dreams!!

What does this mean?

Am I in big trouble?