rivka | Entries tagged with dreams

I dreamed this morning that I had organized some kind of complicated outdoor fair at my church. It was being held on Sunday morning before the service. Everything went well until, as I was cleaning up afterward, the head of the Worship Committee leaned close to me and whispered,

"It's not going well in there."

In a series of crashing realizations, I remembered that:
(1) This was the Sunday I was supposed to be preaching.
(2) The service had already started, and I wasn't in there.
(3) I hadn't even thought about what to do for all the non-sermon portions of the service.
(4) I HAD LEFT MY SERMON AT HOME because I was so preoccupied with the fair.

I frantically sorted through various options in my mind while she looked increasingly horrified: could I give the sermon from memory? Did I have time to run home or send Michael home? What was going on in the sanctuary, if I wasn't there?

Then my sanity reasserted itself and I looked at the head of the Worship Committee firmly: "There is no way I would have signed up to do the fair on the same day that I was preaching. This cannot be my day."

Without a hitch she started telling me that the person giving the service had almost no audience and was really upset about it. Instead of panicking over how badly I had screwed up, all I had to feel was vaguely guilty that I wasn't in there being supportive. Then I hopped on a carnival ride and it carried me home.

Anything is possible in dreams - any location, real or imagined; any activities, plausible or implausible.

So I feel totally cheated that this morning I had a good long dream in which I was picking up tiny plastic toys, the kind that kids are given as prizes or whatever and don't care about or play with. And cheap candy. And bits of paper. For the entire length of the dream, all I did was try to clean up this junk.

Dude. That's not what dreams are for.

I dreamed that I had twins, horrible tiny things like plastic dolls. I couldn't remember whether I was supposed to keep them underwater or not. I kept trying to fill their aquarium, which was like a baby carrier with fold-up sides that had to be adjusted with straps and buckles, so the water kept running out. I thought, "Shit! Their mouths aren't underwater! They can't breathe!" ...and then I wouldn't be sure. Were their mouths supposed to be underwater, or not underwater?

The good thing about weird pregnancy dreams is that, no matter what I do in real life, I will never be as awful a mother as I am in my dreams.

Okay, how old do you have to get before you stop having the dream where you're in college and you suddenly realize you haven't been going to class or doing the readings, and in fact you're not even really sure where the classroom is or when the class is supposed to meet, and it's way too late to drop the class because exams are coming up?

Because, man, at 3 o'clock this morning I suffered through the most incredibly awkward one-on-one meeting with a professor... and I am one.

At 4:15am, Michael jumped up, dragging me out of a dream after him. Then I heard it too: Alex wailing upstairs. Mysteriously, no sound was coming out of the baby monitor that I know I turned up at bedtime. No idea how long she'd been crying before we heard it over the air conditioner.

"She's wet herself," Michael said as we stumbled out of the bedroom. It was the first night we'd given in to her request to sleep in underpants. And as we came into her room, that was what indeed she seemed to be saying through her sobs.

I picked her up. She felt dry, so I hustled her downstairs to the bathroom while she continued to cry hard. I reassured her that she was okay, that we were there, as I sat her on the potty. Michael came down and reported that her bed was also dry.

She broke off her sobs to say, "Mama, are you dressed?" No. "You need to get dressed!"

"I'm busy taking care of you right now, honey."

"There was a snake in my crib," she said abruptly.

"A snake? Oh, that sounds so, so scary."

"Scary," she agreed. She finished up on the potty and I carried her back upstairs, telling her that it was still nighttime, time to go back to bed.

"No, there's a snake!"

"Papa checked your bed, and nothing's in there. You had a bad dream."

She went into the crib willingly. I started the lullabye CD, found her pacifier, stroked her hair. Because she seemed so calm, I went downstairs to use the bathroom myself. Then she started to cry. I went back upstairs to find her huddled in a crouch, on her pillow.

"There's a snake! A snake right there!" She pointed at a wrinkle in her sheet.

I picked her up and sat down in the rocker, and we rocked. Rocked until her breathing slowed and her death grip on my arm loosened and her eyes closed. I slipped her into bed after about 45 minutes, went downstairs, climbed into my own bed, and immediately heard some whimpering and a "Mama!"

Back out of bed, stumbling in the dark. I sat down on the steps to listen. Silence. After about five minutes, I went back to bed, noticing that it was starting to get light outside, and fell into an uneasy sleep.

This morning she remembered: "There was a snake in my bed." We explained a little more about the nature of dreams. I'm sure she's had bad dreams before, but this is the first time she's ever been able to explain her experience.

Poor kid. Poor Mama.

This morning, I dreamed that I had to drive somewhere to take care of an awful bureaucratic mess. I parked right behind the building, even though it was clearly marked as only for employees, reasoning that I'd be out before anyone noticed and towed me. Of course, it took much longer to deal with the business - which I think had to do with the car itself, paying fines or sorting out an expensive registration issue. Something like that.

I finished and walked behind the building, looking for my car, and realized - like a punch to my stomach - that I couldn't see it. I realized that it must have been towed. As I walked hopelessly through the parking lot totalling up the likely charges in my head (towing charge, impound charge, parking fine) and dreading the prospect of telling Michael that I'd been stupid enough to park the car illegally...

...suddenly I realized something. "Hey! I'm DREAMING! I didn't really park there! I don't have to deal with this at all!"

The whole scene dissolved away - literally, like a fancy film transition to another scene. Suddenly I was driving around with Michael, listening to him explain to me that he'd parked the car at a specific intersection, but he didn't know where those streets actually were. Much better.

I don't ever remember being able to do that before. I've managed to wake myself up out of a bad dream, but I've never managed to switch the dream around while it was happening. It was kind of neat.

Incredibly vivid menacing dreams, all night.

( cut because other people's dreams are boring... )

I dreamed that I was making lunch for eight or nine people. When they were all seated around the table and I was dishing out the food, I suddenly realized that there was almost nothing to eat. What I had been thinking of as the main course turned out to just be corn mixed with black beans, and there were only a couple of meager spoonfuls in the bowl - to be split eight ways. The other dishes were in similar shape.

Gosh, whatever could that possibly mean?

Bad night last night. I woke up around five and couldn't get back to sleep - a combination of aches and pains, cold symptoms, the baby moving, and an inability to banish unrestful topics from my mind. Argh.

I think that other pregnant women's parenting anxiety dreams involve human babies.
( dream content follows )

I'm having unbelievable administrative problems at the clinic where I see patients, and some days all I can think of some days is how long it will be until I'm completely supported by other projects and don't have to go there anymore.

But a patient called me recently. I'd seen him only once, a year ago, but here he was again, in considerable distress. At the end of the session he told me how helpful it had been to have someone to talk to.

"Well, I'm glad you thought of me," I said, thinking of our brief connection and long separation.

"Oh," he said simply, "I never forgot you."

I always wonder what happens to the people who see me once or twice and then drift away - if I've had any effect on them at all. It really lifts my spirits to think that this guy went through the last year knowing that, if it got bad, he could call me.

The people at the Oregon Chai company love me and want me to be happy. That's why they've come out with a rooibos version. I've had two pints of chai since I made the happy discovery yesterday. Mmmmmm, chai.

In my most frequently recurring dream, I am trying to get to the airport to go somewhere and am delayed again and again. Last night I had the dream twice. The first time, the friend driving me to the airport wanted to stop by a lesbian bar. I was chatting with an old friend when suddenly I looked down at my watch and realized that I'd missed my plane. "I had no idea it was so late," I thought, as my stomach wrenched. In the second dream, there was an ice storm an hour before we had to leave for the airport. We went out onto the roads to test them, planning to look down at the interstate from an overpass. Traffic was crawling along on the interstate itself, but the onramps were utterly impassable: sheets of ice, deep snow. There was no way I'd make it to the airport.

I wonder where my subconscious thinks I should be going.

We decided yesterday to go visit my parents this weekend. We'll be leaving right after work and running up to upstate New York. It's about a four-and-a-half hour drive, which is awfully close for this to be the first time we'll see them since Christmas.

I don't normally talk about my dreams. But last night I dreamed about a manned spaceflight mission, and I dreamed it in the style of Anthony Trollope - little asides to the reader, and all. It was charming.

Current Mood: The Time Traveler's Wife

I feel much better. The pain is gone, and while I feel a bit woozy, it's not out of line with how I would normally feel waking up from a three-hour afternoon nap like the one I just had. I can focus my eyes. I could eat something. I'm not going to try out my eyes on fluorescent sticky notes, just yet, but the very thought of them doesn't turn my stomach anymore.

Thank you all for the diagnostic help and recommendations. I know very little about migraines. What was throwing me was that the pain was so similar to an ordinary tension headache. I tried the normal things I do - I ate lunch, I drank something caffeinated - but the non-pain symptoms just kept getting worse. The correct thing does indeed seem to have been the painkiller of my choice, followed by several hours in a dark room.

curiousangel does quiet unobtrusive solicitousness extremely well.

I had curious brief snatches of dreams. Most prominently, I dreamed that

truepenny made a pilgrimage to Antarctica. Her subsequent LJ post was so evocative that I could see the blue of the glaciers.

Okay, definitely still woozy.

My subconscious mind is so cute. Twice last night I had dreams whose purpose was so transparent that all I could do was laugh at myself. In the first one, my 6:15am Pilates class had been cancelled. I luxuriated in the knowledge that I could sleep an extra hour and a half, until, in my dream, Michael asked how I'd managed to find out that class was cancelled after I had gone to bed. Oh. In the second dream, I arrived at class to discover that everyone else was leaving. I looked at my watch and realized I had misread the time, and it was already 7:40. "There wasn't even any point in trying to make it to class," I said to myself. Heh. Subtle message, there, subconscious mind.

I got up at 5:45 and went to Pilates anyway. Today's class was harder than last week's, or at least involved more things that I had to modify. I was hampered in several of the exercises by my uneven arm lengths and unbendable right elbow. I was able to use yoga blocks to compensate somewhat for the arm length discrepancy, but several things continued to be difficult. It was hard to find the balance of what I could and couldn't - or should and shouldn't - do with my right arm.
( disability-related thoughts below )

Current Mood: thoughtful

I had the strangest experience this morning. I was not quite asleep, not quite awake. I knew as it was happening that it wasn't real, yet it was more vivid and detailed and multisensory than any dream.

I was lying on my stomach in bed, and it suddenly seemed to me that I was in Lane's bed - just as it was when I used to visit her in Portland. Instead of the slightly sagging double bed I sleep in now, I felt underneath me the featherbed covered in black and white-striped flannel, and the cool firm cotton-sheeted futon below that. I sensed the grey Portland light flitering through the window, in an intangibly different way than the Maryland light does. I felt the chill of the air against my exposed shoulder and felt the sense memory of how cold settled into that house. I sensed the position of the bed in the room, walls behind and to the right of me. All of these sensory impressions were perfectly detailed, perfectly mundane... just as it feels to wake up in a bed and become slowly aware of your surroundings.

"This isn't real," I told myself, and I knew it to be true. But at the same time I had the vivid sensory knowledge of how it would be to turn my head and brush my face against Lane's hair. How it would be softer and finer than the hair of anyone I've slept with since. I inhaled the scent of her shampoo. I had a sense of her size and weight in the bed next to me.

"This isn't real," I told myself again, and this time I imposed some discipline: I started singing to myself in my head, a slow and rhythmic song, a song with lots of lyrics to remember, a song with no connection to her. And the song occupied my mind in an orderly fashion, and gradually I fell asleep again, and when I awoke I knew where I was.

I knew yesterday that she was on my mind, although I still don't know why. But I never imagined that I still had memories like this, or that the past could impose itself on me with such perfectly realistic mimicry.