There’s a strange and quiet reverence in how I admire nightmares more than regular dreams. While ordinary dreams lull the mind into comfort into a stitched patchwork of desire, fantasy, or forgettable wandering nightmares do something far more honest. They strip the veil. They are uninvited truths dressed in grotesque imagery. Shadows of myself made flesh. Where dreams lie to soothe, nightmares expose.

I do not fear them. I respect them.

Nightmares do not flatter. They do not entertain. They reveal. In their twisted corridors, I meet the aspects of my psyche that remain hidden in waking life the unspoken stresses, the suppressed fears, the quiet griefs and unmet expectations. And somehow, in facing them under the dim, distorted light of sleep, I learn more about myself than any pleasant reverie could ever offer.

There is meaning in their discomfort. There is poetry in their terror. They challenge me, and in that challenge, I feel something deeply authentic like an emotional mirror only the unconscious can hold.

Where regular dreams feel like a gentle exhale, nightmares feel like breathing underwater, unnatural, terrifying, yet unforgettable. And in that suffocating clarity, there’s beauty. There’s growth.

So yes, I admire nightmares. Not because they are kind, but because they are real in a way that most things are not.