There is obviously a difference between dreams and reality and ways to tell whether it is reality or not, like mirrors. Your reflection should look different in a dream but what if there are no mirrors or anything to see your reflection with? Dreams also often have disjointed quality, lacking coherence or orderly sequence. Nothing is ever exactly the same as it is in reality. Dreams are also inconsistent, or illogical, or both. The scene changes, it jumps back and forth, and circles around. Dreams are also influenced by our experiences. You can’t read in dreams. The parts of your brain that process language are turned off when you are sleeping. Dreams are kind of like hallucinating, but dreams have a storyline. There’s almost always a plot to the dream while hallucinations are mostly vague, brief images and sounds. Dreams last longer.

Elaine knew that. She knew the difference between the two for the most part, but what she didn’t know was that dreams use more energy in your sleep than when you are awake, especially when you dream often. Your brain wakes you up when your energy levels drop too much. She also didn’t know how to get the dreams to stop. She had tried almost everything from not sleeping to relaxing before bed and avoiding caffeine before bed. She had even dropped caffeine entirely, but nothing was working. Google wasn’t helping much either. It kept saying she either had a tumor or cancer and neither of those were true. She couldn’t go to a doctor; that would cost too much money. Everything costs too much money at this point. Elaine didn’t know what to do. She tried everything Google said to do. She tried all the advice she was given from her friends and family. Nothing worked. Nothing!

You might be wondering why are you so desperate to make the dreams stop? So, what if dreams and reality are hard to tear apart? Wouldn’t you know it’s a dream when you wake up? No, you can’t. You can know when you wake up, but you don’t know whether or not you are waking up in a dream or reality. There are also times when you don’t remember waking up. It’s like when you read a book, but you keep forgetting the words as soon as you read them.  So, you must read the same page over and over again until you can remember the words and move on to the next page—except you don’t remember the words. You move on to the next page anyway knowing that you are going to have no idea what’s happening on the page. You forgot the background which means that there’s no context.