I used to think dreams were a joke.

I grew up in a family full of women who swear their dreams are real. My mom, my grandma, my aunts; all had stories about dreams that meant something or came true.

In my experience, none of them ever did.

I treated dreams like heresy. Entertaining fairytales you nod through and forget about. One time my grandma told me, dead serious, “Be careful. I had a dream you were in a hotel room with three guys in their underwear. They all had thick legs.”

I told her thanks. If I ever find myself in that situation I will not stick around to see what is going on.

That was my posture toward dreams. Mildly amused. Mostly dismissive.

Part of that was because my dreams didn’t really visit me.

For most of my life, when I closed my eyes, there was nothing. No images, no scenes, no subconscious theater. Just a black screen. I often woke up confused — unsure when I’d fallen asleep or how long I’d been gone. Sleep was never something I chose. It overtook me.

I fell asleep in classrooms, on couches, at desks, on strangers’ shoulders. Sometimes I woke up in my own bed with no memory of getting there. I’d argue with people who told me I had been asleep, because from inside my body it felt like I’d been awake the whole time.

When you don’t trust the boundary between being awake and being asleep, you stop trusting anything that comes from the other side of it.

There was one recurring dream I hated… my sister falling onto the train tracks… metal screeching… body freezing. That helpless split second where you know exactly what’s about to happen and can’t reach fast enough.
I still tense up whenever I’m on the train with her. Anyone who knows my sister knows she loves trains. She barely leaves the house, but she knows every route in the city. As if she studies the maps all day. Those who’ve read Everyone Communicates, you know my sister is on the autism spectrum.

Other than that occasional reoccurring rarity, no dreams.

So dreams felt fake to me. Romanticized — like astrology and horoscopes. Something people leaned on when reality felt too unpredictable.

Then, at 26, they started showing up more frequent.

With gravitas.

I started waking up with emotion still oozing from me. Fear that didn’t evaporate with daylight. Sadness that didn’t have a clear cause. Feelings that were so intense for something that “wasn’t real.” I started writing the dreams down because ignoring them felt reckless.

Most of them felt symbolic, abstract or emotional. Not predictive.

Then there was one I didn’t write down.

In July of 2025, I couldn’t fall asleep. That alone should’ve told me something was wrong. Sleep has never been my enemy. Being awake has.

That night my body wouldn’t shut down. I kept shifting, flipping the pillow, changing positions. My brain felt loud; like a computer running background processes it refused to close. Eventually, sometime before midnight, I slipped under.

I was on the train.

Fluorescent lights flickering. The air thick and polluted. That damp underground smell of oil, piss, and human neglect. East Harlem. People scattered across the train cart, no one talking, or making eye contact. Everyone pretending not to see each other.

Then there was a dude who stood out effortlessly in a sea of people. If you’re from NYC you’ve seen him before.

He was pacing.

Muttering to himself. Voice gruff, broken, possibly possessed. He was loud enough to make the cart tense. But quiet enough that no one wanted to be the one to react.

The kind of presence that makes your shoulders tighten without realizing it.

At some point his attention locked onto me.

I don’t remember the exact words he said, but I remember the feeling. The instinctual calculation where your body decides something is wrong before your brain does. He moved closer and closer. The space around me started to collapse.

The fear came fast.

Things escalated. I don’t know how else to say it. There was a knife. In my hand. The moment stretched and compressed at the same time. And then I stabbed him.

I woke up the second his body hit the ground.

I was gasping like I’d been underwater. Crying. My heart slamming against my ribs. Shaking in a way that felt disproportionate to something that was a “fairytale.”

It was a bit past midnight when I checked my phone. I sat there for a while, trying to calm my breathing. I prayed. I stared at the ceiling. Eventually, I went back to sleep.

Two and a half hours later, my mom burst into my room.

She was crying, in a panicked state. Her words were tripping over each other. She asked me to call my aunt because she wasn’t sure she heard correctly.

I called.

My aunt said, “You heard the news? Yeah… I’m sorry. Your uncle is dead.”

A few minutes later, a photo of my uncle’s body was dropped into the family WhatsApp chat. I don’t know why that was necessary. He was naked. A blanket half-covered him. There was a gash on his forehead. He was lying on the ground like something discarded.

My uncle had schizophrenia and bipolar disorder. Actually mentally ill — not self-diagnosed like most of us these days. He’d been in and out of psychiatric wards for crimes he’d committed in the past.

A mentally ill person.

That’s when my dream stopped feeling like a dream.

The man in it was mentally ill.

So was my uncle.

The details didn’t line up cleanly. My uncle didn’t die the way the man in my dream did. He had a stroke. He fell and hit his head.

But still — the timing sat in my stomach like something unfinished.

Only later did I start wondering if my relationship with sleep had anything to do with why this rattled me so deeply. I have a genetic deficiency called G6PD. I didn’t know about it until I was 18. Growing up, my body shut down without warning. My awareness flickered. There were gaps in my memory where time simply disappeared.

I’ve fallen asleep mid-conversation. I’ve fallen asleep and argued that I hadn’t. During driving lessons, I once fell asleep on the highway. The last thing I remembered was being awake in the Bronx. I woke up drifting into the next lane in Manhattan. My instructor didn’t notice until I did.

When you live like that, you don’t trust altered states. You don’t romanticize the subconscious. You treat anything that happens outside of conscious control as suspect.

So no — I don’t know if dreams are prophetic. I don’t know if that night was coincidence, symbolism, or my brain forcing meaning onto chaos. I’m not writing this to convince you of anything. I’m not claiming insight or authority.

I’m just saying something in me cracked.

I used to laugh at people who trusted their dreams. Now I’m quieter about it.

And if dreams really can see things before we do, if they sometimes arrive as warnings instead of stories, I’m not sure that’s a gift.

I’m not sure I always want it to be true.