It's hard to say if the kid was me. I don't have third-person dreams of myself much anymore. It was a common experience, as a child, to dream of myself seeing myself, disembodied. That became less common as I aged into being a teen, and even further in the rearview as I took to caffeine & nicotine & alcohol. There came a moment in my early 20s, living in my first apartment by myself, when I had a full-on out-of-body experience. Obviously in retrospect it was a common nightmare, maybe a nighthag-- it was around this time I first became aware of my occasional sleep paralysis --but seeing myself from above, in full light, realizing I couldn't regain access to my sleeping form, gave me a vertiginous sense of panic, and in my noncorporeal, disembodied state, there was nothing for it: I was not my body, and I could not return to it, and that realization slammed the gate on the dream. Cut to black: fade up: I was awake again, on the couch, staring directly into the painful blur of the frosted globe overhead, wondering what had happened, and why I hadn't turned off the damned light so I could have had a peaceful night's rest.
Somewhere in that phase of my life (I'm fairly sure it was firmly Before, but if that chronological placement is true, it disquiets me because the out-of-body dream takes on a premonitory tone) I had a significant overdose of mushrooms, and that led to a disembodiment of sorts as well; in the weeks and months afterward I was prone to seeing myself in dreams in the third person. This became such a constant I began to think I had stopped dreaming in first person p.o.v., and even noticed a tendency, in my memories, to visualize myself as though an outside observer to my own existence.
None of these things are standard, anymore. I sleep like an ordinary human, albeit a human who's had a fair bit of brain trauma. A human who pedals an imaginary bicycle in their sleep, a human who wakes in midsentence & mid-shout, every now and again. Sometimes I'll dream about myself in the third person, or about being someone else altogether, but all in all, I feel whole & healed. That said, I'm also no longer myself: I don't really relate to the kid I had been. I don't have most of his memories. Most of my school years are vague unknowns, the classmates & staggered early attempts at friendship have all but evaporated. It's hard to reconcile that aspect of my consciousness, and it worries me, time to time, that letting those threads completely slip will lead to a greater unraveling of memory & mind in the future.
But it was interesting, after all these years, to have caught a glimpse of the blonde kid with blue-green eyes who I remember sharing a continuity with. He wasn't a bad sort. He didn't sleep great. He had nightmares. He didn't know how to talk to people, and felt like he wasn't really supposed to, the majority of the time. He was always more comfortable walking in the woods & studying bees farming queen anne's lace. He didn't have many stuffed animals, that I recall. He'd inherited one of his uncle's favorites, a limp dachshund with a hard silly plastic face & rolling, weighted eyes, and that was a comfort to sleep with... But it was mainly the crocheted blue and green and white blanket he'd had as a baby, his very own Linus blanket, that had been the main companion and comfort.
I'm not sure the kid I woke up dreaming about was me. He looked at me like a stranger.
I wonder what the dreamer looks like, to the dream?
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