You ever have like, a retromare? A dream that is not disturbing in the moment yet, when you wake up, acquires undeniably nightmarish overtones?
And I don't mean like, "oh this is actually disturbing" in a rational sense. Not like you dream of peeling off your skin but in the dream it seems normal and okay. I mean like... the vibes were off and what seemed like a non-frightening dream has a disturbing cast. In the way that a dream is sometimes a nightmare just because it's draped in dread.
I had this dream, just now, about my across-the-hallway neighbor (I don't have an across-the-hall neighbor in this building) having people over to remove my apartment's door, seemingly by mistake at first but eventually for nonsense dream-logic reasons ("I just wanted all the chair lovers in the building to enjoy this chair.")
And like, this did not play out as a nightmare; it played out as one of those anxiety dreams where the world has suddenly gone unreasonable and you're railroaded into being the Karen. You know the ones.
And yet when I woke up and I could see my dream apartment in my mind's eye, it was like... this vast stygian space not really meant for human habitation. Every room was seemingly tens of metres long and anything further out was darkness. The dream ended with me going to sleep in some weird room in the corner of this oversized apartment; said room looked very much like a cathedral. Sleeping in it looked very much like lying in state as a corpse.