One of the biggest mysteries in my life is what dreaming feels like.

Most people talk about dreams like they are universal. They describe nightmares, strange adventures, fragmented memories, impossible landscapes, or conversations that made no sense after waking up. Dreams seem woven into the normal rhythm of being human.

But for most of my life, I have not experienced sleep that way.

I have epilepsy, and my seizures are triggered during REM sleep—the stage most associated with dreaming. Instead of restful nights filled with stories the mind creates, my sleep has often been interrupted by seizures, fragmented awareness, confusion, physical exhaustion, and the lingering feeling that my brain never fully settles into rest.

People sometimes ask what I dream about, and the honest answer is: I usually do not know.

There is just absence.

A blank space between falling asleep and waking up.

And that absence has always felt strangely isolating because dreaming is treated like such a shared human experience. People bond over dreams. They laugh about them, analyze them, fear them, write stories from them. Entire books, films, and philosophies are built around the dream world.

Meanwhile, I am left wondering what that experience truly feels like when it is uninterrupted.

That is the mystery I have never solved.

What does a normal dream feel like? What does it feel like to move through sleep without your body turning against you? To wake up remembering images instead of recovering from exhaustion or pain?

I do not think most people realize how much epilepsy can steal quietly, in ways that are difficult to explain. Not just moments of consciousness, but experiences people assume everyone has access to.

Sometimes I wonder if dreams still exist somewhere beneath the seizures, buried under disrupted signals and electrical storms my brain never asked for. Maybe they happen and disappear before I can reach them. Maybe they are interrupted before they can become memory.

Or maybe there is simply silence there.

I may never fully understand it, and that uncertainty has followed me my entire life.

But I think mysteries are not always about finding answers. Sometimes they are about learning to live beside the unknown parts of yourself—the spaces where explanation ends, and experience begins.