All of My Dreams Turned Into Nightmares.
If nothing else good comes from the pandemic, it has at least given me an opportunity to sleep a solid eight hours every night. I rarely need to get up with an alarm, and I have revamped my schedule so that I rarely have to be anywhere before noon.
This may seem a bit extravagant, especially when most people are up well before noon – but I don’t sleep until noon. I just get up at my leisure, even if I’ve stayed up until 2:00 in the morning. What I’ve learned is that having an alarm set makes me wake in fits and starts all night long, so I don’t sleep well. Literally I hallucinate the alarm all night long, and wake up in a panic. No alarm? No problem.
Even more fun, I now remember my dreams. Last week, I met Rod Stewart, again, in my dream. Unfortunately, while trying to take a selfie with him at the helm of a ship, the captain stole my cell phone and the dream turned into a nightmare.
After that, all of my dreams turned into nightmares.
In one particularly horrifying dream, I was just walking down a country road in the darkness … when a war plane flew over dropping thousands of Russian paratroopers into the night’s sky. One by one they landed, like a bad movie, rousting people from their beds and taking them into communist custody. I woke up before anyone got shot.
But a couple of nights later, I was at a bridal shower when a woman pulled out a rifle to shoot a child. Since I always carry my own rifle with me at parties, I pulled out my rifle and shot at the woman before she could kill the child – but I missed. I killed another woman instead, and spent the rest of the dream running from the police and all of the friends who’d seen me do it.
I love analyzing dreams as they happen, but I’ve had trouble with this particular set of nightmares. I’m not sure what the “bad guy” in the dream represents. Normally I ascribe three adjectives to the person/thing in the dream, and that tells me which part of me or my life I’m dreaming about. Then I psychoanalyze myself and the nightmares go away.
But I just feel victimized in all of these dreams. My tried-and-true method of dream analysis has failed me. I can’t ascribe three adjectives to Russian paratroopers or the ship’s captain; they are faceless, nameless. And do I blame myself for shooting an innocent woman, or do I congratulate myself for trying to be a hero – and who’s the bad guy, really?
Last night, I dreamed that a group of cats discovered a hole in my body – from which a worm was trying to escape. Within two minutes, I had worms crawling out from under my skin everywhere – short, fat worms and three-foot-long fat ones, and caterpillar-like creepy things. Some odd nurse-lady told me it would continue indefinitely. “They all have to come out,” she said.
I woke up, again, thinking: WHY??? Why worms? I have no idea what the lurking unconscious motivation might be.
Anyway, it’s been a long few weeks. Since my life pretty much revolves around waiting for Shane’s college acceptances and planning return visits, I wonder if that might be it. But it feels like something more is brewing under the surface – and not worms.
It feels like I’m being attacked every night in my sleep.