This past summer, I spent a month traveling through the Eastern African country of Tanzania. The time I spent there was full of life-changing experiences, amazing memories, elephants, and incredibly wild dreams. Before leaving I had to go to the travel clinic to pick up malaria pills. Upon receiving the pills, my doctors warned me that one of the major side effects of these pills was nightmares. I have never had any crazy or out of the ordinary experiences with dreams before, so instead of getting anxious of this, I was more excited to let my imagination go wild in my dreams.

During the first week or so, my schedule was turned upside down and my sleeping pattern was not regulated. I had not had any vivid dreams yet and forgot about the possibility of having them until the eleventh day there when I woke up in a sweat and gasping for air. My sheets were thrown off the bed and breathing heavily, my dream replayed in my head. I could vividly remember my a woman viciously throwing me onto the ground kicking and punching me. In my dream she was a lunatic trying to kill me, but in real life, this woman is something like a second-mother to me. I was horrified. 

Almost every night these dreams continued. I would wake up terrified because a member of my family or close friend was trying to kill me. I started to fear going to sleep at night to find out who the next murderer would be. In the article The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud makes the distinction between latent content and manifest content. Manifest content is what you actually dreamt, and latent content is the meaning of the dream. Waking up, I would remember all of the manifest content but could not figure out the latent content at all. I had no idea why all of these people who supposedly loved me were out to kill me. Granted, the malaria pills were the reason I was having nightmares, but they didn't choose the content of my dreams. Freud speaks or representation, a thought translated to a visual image, and symbolism, a symbol replaced a an action, person, or idea. Was i thinking that these people truly wanted to kill or did not love me anymore? Did the acting of trying to kill me really mean something totally different?

Since leaving Tanzania, I continued to have nightmares until, I'm assuming, my malaria medication wore off. The vividness and intensity of my dreams were something I have never experienced before, and would wonder how Freud would interpret...since I mylset have no idea why this happened.