Dreams are something humans can experience every time they go to sleep. For Kaylee Allensworth, ’20, dreams are something she remembers all too well.
“I’ve had a dream where my teeth are falling out… I’ve had a dream where I’m on a train and there’s a shapeshifter and I stab my brother… the list goes on,” she said.
Allensworth is sitting in a wooden desk chair, her legs crossed and her eyes roaming the tan walls of the room. Her busy schedule keeps her on edge, “constantly moving.”
For Allensworth, the dreams come often, and they come hard, leaving her in a state of shock upon awakening. There have been times where she has had strong emotional reactions to the intensity of these dreams.
“I had a dream where my teeth were falling out and I looked like a grandma… I definitely woke up freaked out and crying that night,” Allensworth explained.
She speaks of the time before her trip to Spain and Africa as she flips her hair quickly behind her ear. She moves her hands around, filling the space in front of her, explaining the malaria pills she had to take, and the most vivid dreams she has ever had while on them.
“The first week was fine… right before I left I had the teeth-falling-out dream. While I was in Africa, I had this dream where I was being chased by monkeys… and the one stabbing brother one,” Allensworth illustrates. “My brother and I were on this train and we were fighting this shape-shifter… he turned into my brother, and I ended up stabbing my brother.”
She explains her three weeks after the trip while she sits a little straighter, how she continually had a dream where “I thought my coworker was calling me in a dream, and I woke up, and he wasn’t. It was super weird.”
Allensworth’s dreams are not limited to her time spent in Africa. The most recurring dream she has experienced was one involving a cat and a lobster. While chasing a cat around the house she grew up in, she encounters a lobster. The lobster starts to multiply, “filling the house like water,” and eventually causes the house to explode with the many crustaceans inside.
Leaning forward, she opens her arms as she articulates the explosion, eyes wide. When she finished, she relaxed and admitted, “I don’t know why I’ve had that dream… I used to watch the tanks at Red Lobster a lot and that’s the only explanation I have.”
When asked about life events that might have caused certain dreams, she returned to the one where she stabbed her own brother saying that “a friend of mine psychoanalyzed my dream… and she thinks the reason that I had the dream was because of how close I felt with my brother growing up.” She cracks her knuckles and looks over at the wall. “I do feel I’m missing out on his development,” Allensworth admitted.
Her everyday life does affect her, but it does not hinder her from achieving her goals. She admits that the vivid dreams she has experienced can be “a bad start to the day,” but she understands that every day is a new beginning and a new dream along with it.
