656: Dreaming

I am continually amazed at the “stuff” that comes up in my nightly forays into the land of slumber. Do your dreams consist of the strangest things, or is that just my demented brain?

Many people attach great significance to the things that they dream: the people, the objects, the settings and situations, the issues that crop up – even whether you dream in black and white or in color is supposed to have some sort of significance – or so I  am told. Dreams are portents of things to come, or the subconscious processing of things that have passed. I hope not.

Jeepers, creepers, I hope not. My dreams are nothing I want to see happen in my future, and many of them are nothing that has every happened in my past, and some of them are just surreal short stories or novel-length aberrations of a twisted reality I’d much prefer, like, and hope to think had nothing whatsoever to do with awake me.

Maybe that’s why I am up so late at night: I am just avoiding joining in the madness that awaits on the other side of waking.

598: Failure

Nobody likes to fail.

Nobody likes ADMITTING that they failed, much less the painful process of actually FAILING.

The constant mental re-plays…if only I had done THAT instead, it would have changed the outcome……why didn’t THAT occur to me at the time, so I could have done something differently……why did I not recognize that as a RED FLAG? Heck no, at the TIME, that red flag was a glowing, rosy PINK flag……..sheesh. Gotta get rid of these glasses.

And then comes the sneaking, stealthy, sly subconscious. The DREAMS about failing. Not necessarily the specific thing I failed at, oh, no! These are horrible, inventive fantasies; dark, macabre imaginings of all the OTHER ways I could possibly fail at something.

Such as – dreaming of being a waitress (yes, I, too, did this in college) at a pizza-cum-sandwich shop – and getting ALL the orders wrong, having to apologize profusely to all the incensed customers, take all the blame, and give them their food for free – which I know is going to come out of my miniscule paycheck, of course. FABULOUS dream. Can’t WAIT to have it again. The groveling, you know, that’s what excites me the most.

Then there’s the nightmare about the trip – I get to the airport, after having meticulously packed (and pre-weighed) my bag for this international flight, and discover my purse (with the passport, of course), is missing. Instant panic. WHERE did I leave it on my journey to the airport? On the train? In the taxi? OMG! The flight departs in an hour! Or, (alternate variation on this theme), the bag I carefully packed and weighed to comply with all the myriad regulations for flying (which I looked up online prior to getting started packing, just to be sure), ISN’T in compliance, after all. And now I must choose, standing at the inspection table surrounded by harried passengers, which items to discard so they will actually let me get on the flight using the ticket I have paid for. Should I ditch the shampoo? The tampons? The evening gown? The sandals? The sunscreen? AAUUGGHHHhhhhhh…………! Meanwhile, the clock is ticking down to the time they will close the boarding gate, and I will be…..LEFT BEHIND. With no refund of monies paid.

Or the teacher dream: supervising a field trip and having something go wrong when I am responsible for twenty something (or more) students and chaperones. I am scrambling to fix whatever thing has gone awry, and doing a perfectly miserable job of it, because, of course, this is a FAILURE dream, and nothing I do in one of those dreams works out to my advantage. Ever. And usually, it involves a copious amount of my favorite thing – groveling to all and sundry as I meekly confess my culpability.

Or my personal favorite – I am fleeing a menacing, pursuing presence through all the halls and rooms of an infinite decaying, crumbling mansion….for hours and hours, all the while knowing that the terrible pursuing menace is going to corner and catch and murder horrifically. Yup. Personal favorite. I usually wake up trying to scream from that one, panting like I’ve just run the Boston Marathon.

Bad enough to fail in real life, when I am conscious. Failing in my dreams is infinitely worse – the dream failures seem every bit as real as the real-life failures, and I can have more than one of them per night. Subconscious self-torture. Whoopity doo.

474: Ode

Ode.

An ode is a lyrical poem that expresses strong feeling or sentiment for someone or something.

Really.

So when I say I don’t want to live without you, that qualifies?

Or, do I have to make it pretty, and dress it up with rhyme and meter

So that it becomes both something more…and less

Than it was before, when I said it all in one sentence?

There are very, very few things humans can’t live without.

Air, water, and curiously, sleep – where dreams rule.

And yes, you are that essential to me.

Ode.

467: Hope Flowers

I’m wrapped a little too tight.

You are tugging at my layers, gently

slowly, easing the shields aside

opening up the flower

that I could become

in your hands.

You are bringing forth hidden dreams

and igniting the hope

that this time it won’t

come crashing down into another twisted wad of tangled tears.

You are scaring me

please don’t stop.

245: Dreaming

Many people think that dreams are portents of things to come, or explanations of things that are, or even releases of things that are worrying you. I dang sure hope not.  My dreams have not been very reassuring.

I have one, repeatedly, where I am fleeing through a castle-mansion sort of structure, and someone/something nasty is after me – that one comes in cycles. Then there is the one where I am sorting through various useless stuff, and finding coins, or jewelry, or gems. That one I would not mind being a portent of things to come, actually. Then there is the one where I pick up spilled sewing pins, or spilled seed beads all night long, or the one where I sort out a huge pile of mixed nuts, bolts, screws and nails.  What kind of dream is THAT?  An attempt to restore order to the universe??

When I was waitressing during my college years, there were the nights when I worked at my waitressing job all night in my dreams. NOT fun. Now that I am a teacher, occasionally (not often, thank GOD), I teach school all night. That’s mostly the sort of dreams I have.

Only once in a very great while do I have one of the triple x-rated ones. THOSE I would not mind having a lot more often – seriously. If I could figure out what triggers that kind of dream, I’d repeat it. So far, though, I can’t tell what causes those – maybe something I ate? Wish I knew.

My husband has really screwy, surreal dreams, and often, people he knows or knew figure in them. That seldom happens to me – usually, I am all alone in my dreams (unless something is chasing me). When my first husband passed away, I dreamed that he really didn’t die, he just ran away from our marriage for about seven or eight years, and then reappeared after I had married someone else. That one sucked big time. I had it again when I finally DID remarry. Creepy.

I think you should be able to select a dream topic, like choosing a movie. This crap shoot every night is for the birds.

240: Cat Epilepsy??

Sport Model

This is Sport Model. He is a sweet and loving Moroccan boy kitty about seven or eight months old. He is curiously elegant. He also has bad dreams, flashbacks and apparently, epilepsy! When someone left him on the doorstep as a kitten, I adopted him, of course, and he joined the inmates of the local cat orphanage – my house – with a number of other cats (it fluctuates, depending on who’s out visiting, and who’s decided not to come home). Lately, there are seven.  We let the oldest ones outside to explore a bit, but not the younger ones (Sport) since we worry about the babies. He still went out on his own one day, though, when he found the door open, and he GOT LOST. OMG. Where is HOME??

He was gone not even one whole day, and my husband went looking for him in the evening and heard him mewing piteously in the apartment building next door, so he rescued Sport and brought him home. It was apparent Sport was significantly traumatized by this experience, since all that evening, he kept having LOST flashbacks. He’d be in the living room (with mom and dad and all the kitty siblings) and he’d sort of zone out, and start mewing piteously again – I’M LOST, COME FIND ME, I’M LOST, COME FIND ME, until one of us would speak to him. Then he’d snap out of it, and look sheepish. He’s not gone near the door again. He remembers.

He also has bad dreams. He was sleeping on the banquette (a Moroccan sofa) and he had a bad dream. What must have been a REALLY, REALLY bad dream. Like Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Scream (all versions), Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason (all versions), Halloween, the Exorcist, Children of the Corn, Wrong Turn,  SAW and several others, all rolled into one.  Poor baby. He woke up, but he was still in the dream world, and he was FREAKED OUT, crouched and shivering for some time before he finally realized he was safe at home and everything was OK. No more monsters. Then he looked sheepish again.

The last bad dream he had, he had a convulsion-fit. He was frothing at the mouth, and turning rigidly in circles for a few minutes (running from the monsters?) until he came out of it. Could be sleepwalking, maybe. Poor baby. He’s such a sweetheart the rest of the time, and he cannot help whatever it is that’s wrong. We’ll consult the vet next month (a few days from now) when it is time for his regular inoculations and see what’s up – how common is epilepsy in cats???