Padromal Storms
2026-06-17
Can you believe we made it to another day? Can you?
I took a late afternoon nap yesterday, and yet again I had a series of strangely vivid and metaphysically discombobulating dreams. The highlight from these dreams: I was watching a weather report from some news station, and the weather reporter was talking about an upcoming "padromal" storm that hadn't been seen by anyone alive today; it was something akin to a total solar eclipse—a rare natural event that would only be witnessed once in everyone's lifetime. Strangely, I think I might've been conflating that made-up word with a real word: prodromal. So this event, whatever it was, could've been speaking to an onset of some kind of attack or disease. Even stranger, the weather reporter had that professional tone and cadence one would see of a typical television news reporter. The sense of calmness he had in describing what would be essentially a rare natural disaster was perhaps the most unsettling part of the dream. Then, I had to think of the Seuss-esque portmanteau of the word "padromal." It seemed to be a combination of the Spanish "padre" and "prodromal."
I won't elaborate on that further.
What's also interesting about those afternoon naps is that when I am oscillating in these more lucid dream states, I can feel a deep numbing and tingling sensation all throughout my body. It's as if there's that sleep paralysis attempting to make its way through my nerves, but I can more actively resist it due to a glitch in my active cognitive state. There's a malady of self-awareness there, perhaps—as if being self-aware is the disease itself, that I'm breaking some kind of natural rule by figuring out how to control my dreams. A common thing that'll happen in dreams for me is becoming self-aware and prodding characters in my dream for information. They look at me like they've been compromised, bewildered that I'm as aware as I am. It's something out of the ordinary for them, despite the surreal nature of the environments themselves.
My strong control of dreams has forced my hand in questioning certain metaphysical assertions about reality, and the older I've gotten, the deeper the rabbit hole seems to go. I've known for years that sensory experience is an illusion, and that the energies constituting reality are beyond empirical investigation. However, there's not much of a way to prod it further, mostly due to the ephemeral nature of these visions and dreams; they're not something I can revisit and experiment on the same way a physical scientist can. I can't replicate things or find patterns, and it's especially difficult because the second I try to approach my dreams with that level of curiosity and inquiry, the indigenous beings of those worlds take notice and contain me somehow.
It's tough to gauge where exactly I'm going in my dreams. Is it traveling somewhere far away toward outer reaches of the observable universe? Is it opening rifts in space-time to access different dimensions? Or is it really nothing at all? With how much I can control my dreams, it suggests to me that the environment is something greater than a series of neurochemical reactions. I say that because the dream characters act as autonomous beings. If it's all in my head, I should be able to control their actions, but I can't. I've tried: I will try telling dream characters to say certain things to see if I control them, and they refuse. This to me suggests that those places I go to are not entirely machinations of my mind; they can be accessed by my mind, but only under a strict set of natural conditions.
I try not to look for omens in my dreams, particularly because that is idolatry and goes against the commands of God, but in the same way I can't control dream character dialogue, I don't have ways to control whether or not I dream at all. Most nights I dream, but some nights I don't remember them; so there's not really anything I can do to prevent their influence—just like how it is when I'm awake. The only thing I can really do is process my reaction around it, as well as the thoughts surrounding different situations and stimuli. Still, in the same way I must discern my thoughts while awake, I must also do so while I'm asleep. Is there really a great storm coming? If so, what can I really do to stop it?
The last thing I'd want to do is nothing at all.
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