My alarm went off at 7:09 this morning, and I hit snooze. Seven minutes later, when it went off again, instead of hitting the snooze, I turned the whole thing off and dropped directly back into a dream.

I dreamt that I was in a house that looked a lot like the one my parents live in, only with more bedrooms upstairs. I was there because a young woman had just committed suicide because she was unable to achieve her goal which was to get married and have three children. She was so focused on the proposition that that was how her life was supposed to work out, that when it started to go another way, she couldn’t accept it and ended it.

Her spirit was still in the room and we started talking. The interaction was initially friendly, she was grateful and relieved to have someone with whom to talk, until I tried to convince her that she didn’t belong in that space anymore. She turned on me and started calling me names, saying I was both fat and ugly, directing violent and deep vehemence towards me. I walked to the bank of windows to raise the blinds that covered them, thinking that the light would help her realize that this was no longer her world. In the dream I started speaking the words, “You don’t belong here,” first weakly and then louder, until the voice in my head was shouting. She pointed her attention towards me and defensively screamed, “You’re wrong. You’re the one who doesn’t belong here, I’m going to be here forever.” With that she was gone, having walked away from me, straight through a wall. I stood there for a moment, knowing that she was wrong, knowing that she didn’t belong there and knowing that I would win.

At that moment my brain started battling for consciousness, pulling me up through the hazy dream-state and back into the waking world. It was hard to open my eyes, my face still partially frozen in REM sleep paralysis. I stumbled over to the window to open the blinds and let the cool air in, an unconscious mimicking of my actions in the dream. Heading for the kitchen to make coffee, my still-groggy brain started to process and interpret. I think that the girl was a piece of me, one that I’ve been working on getting rid of. She’s the voice in my head that I believe that tells me that I’m worthless and that I won’t succeed. She brought me to battle in my subconscious representation of home, thinking she could win there. She was wrong.