Dreams, Please Don't Come True

   Dreams are strange. We run through our heads and see scenarios that we may or may not want to happen, or scenarios that are just unreal. When we wake up, we pray for a dream to turn reality, or fervently hope that it will stay safely in our heads.
   Last night I had a dream that a good friend of mine died from some kind of complication in one of his organs. When I received the call, I was at some kind of lake or beach, with my boyfriend and a couple of other people. I heard the words, said by a voice that was oddly robotic, and collapsed to the ground screaming. The rest of the dream is a blur.
    That dream is one of the maybe five remembered nightmares that I've had in my entire life. I've been luckier than most with nightmares. If I do have a nightmare, it rarely scares me bad enough to leave a mark on my psyche.
    Some people aren't so lucky. A guy I know has had bad nightmares his whole life. Some are stupid, random things that he forgets in the morning. Others are deeper, with friends and family being killed or tortured right before his eyes. None of them are things he wants to see happen in real life.
    These nightmares are most likely rooted in the harsh impact that many bad childhood occurrences have had on his mind. He has a wide variety of fears, and good reasons for them. Sexual abuse, bullying, constant moving, seeing good friends struggle with depression and lose, and many more events have shaken up his soul so much that it's barely stable anymore. I've been on the phone with him late at night, and he's fallen alseep and woken up screaming five minutes later multiple times. It's terrifying to hear the fear in his voice when he wakes, to know that his brain just deceived him again.
   I'm not really trying to make any point with this post, I just wanted to randomly talk about nightmares. My friend's case is the worst I've heard of (not that I'm really an expert, but I know my stuff). Almost every night he has these nightmares, and they're never the same. It's odd, because usually constant nightmares are the same or similar things. But, like I said, I'm hardly an expert.