The speaker describes a dream in which they became their own skull, the hard bony shape that sits beneath the face. It's an odd, quietly unsettling image. In sleep, the speaker doesn't just see death's emblem but occupies it, as if it were something that belonged to them alone, "a thing of my own."
The second part turns toward a stranger thought. The speaker finds it troubling that this experience, this absence, makes dying feel less foreign. If we can already imagine being the skull, then death loses some of its distance. The word "strange" is slippery here: it could mean that death now seems less strange, or that it's strange to feel so at ease with it. The poem leaves that open.
The mood is calm, eerie, and thoughtful. There's no panic, just a cool, almost detached unease. The title, "Self-actualization," adds a dark irony, since the self being realized here is the one that will outlast the living body.