Dreams

Lately I've gotten a lot of interupted sleep. I mean, not that I've gotten a lot of sleep, but that the sleep I've gotten has been interupted a lot, broken up into segments. I suspect it's making me a tad cranky, but it has been interupted in the middle of some interesting dreams, a few sequences which I've remembered long enough to take them out and examine them a bit.

In one dream my husband and I were staying in a motel above a pub or bar in Paris. Jeff had just announced we were going to a concert somewhere that night and we needed to go up to our room to change..... when the phone rang and woke me up. I was bummed because I really would have rather still been on that night out in Paris then in the morning I woke up into. Not psychologically deep perhaps, but nice to know I have plans that include my hubby in them. Lately, between work and kids, we don't get to spend much time together.

The other night I dreamed I was standing outside my home, which wasn't the home I actually live in, but in the dream it felt like my house. I was feeling all stressed out and had stepped outside to take a break from things. The view was of a huge swamp just beyond the back yard. As I was looking at it I noticed that although it was indeed sort of swampy, it wasn't completely stagnant. It was flowing, albeit slowly. And it was rather pretty. I decided maybe I shouldn't feel depressed with such a pretty scene I could stand outside and enjoy........
hmmm, I guess I don't work real hard for complex symbolism. Methinks I've been feeling a bit "bogged down", eh?

The dream went on from there. I decided to walk around my property and see what else I could see. I went up over a hill and from the top of it I realized my overlooked a small bay. The view included a couple other homes, a few docks and boats. The water was unusually clear and turquoise blue, like tropical waters. As I stood and enjoyed the new discovery that I was so close to the ocean, I realized that there were whales playing in the water. Killer whales. A few large ones, some smaller younger ones. They swam right near the shore and were very clear from above. They swam, swirled, sometimes they leaped into the air and splashed back down into the water. After a few minutes they started to move out into deeper water and soon they were gone. I didn't feel disappointed. I just stood there happy at having had the opportunity to witness such a scene.... and then family noises intruded and I woke up. Perhaps I was telling myself that I wasn't stuck with one way of looking at things, that if I just walked around my territory a bit I'd find some different scenery, something amazing, something like the ocean, that I loved. Maybe I was telling myself to get to higher ground so I could have a bigger perspective on things. I guess I don't think I'm out of options yet.

My favorite recent dream though was of a different house, although in the dream it was my home. It wasn't anything like the house I really live in. I often dream of houses that are nothing like my real house. Usually they are large and my family only livez in a portion of them. Almost always, although it's not always the main focus of the dream, I'm aware there's a part of the house that frightens me and that I try to avoid. Sometimes it's a door although other times it's an area - a basement, the attic, or a crawl space. Despite that, I generally have positive feelings about these house dreams. (It's interesting to note that I once lived in a house with a haunted crawl space. I've also lived in houses with creepy basements.)

In my most recent dream, I was in a house - my house. I was just doing ordinary stuff - cleaning, checking on the kids. Stuff like that. I kept passing this door that was "the door" - the one that frightened me. I was just trying to get things done but in the background I kept hearing sounds from beyond the door, clearly made to try to frighten me.

Finally, after passing down a hall by the door a half dozen times or so, hearing the sounds, I decided I had had enough. Without having planned to, without realizing I was going to, I turned around, took hold of the door knob, flung open the door, flipped on the light, and started down the steps. (apparently this scary place was in the basement) The scary thing, perhaps it was just a person, maybe it was a monster, saw me coming, and I could see it sort of hunched over waiting for me at the bottom of the stairs and a little bit out in the room below. It started making more and more noise, upping the ante. And I was terrified. Completely terrified.

But more then I was terrified, I was fed up. I was sick and tired of being frightened and I was mad. So I kept going down the steps, yelling at whatever it was below me, determined I was going to confront the damn thing and end this nonstop fear of the unknown once and for all.....

at this point my husband shook me awake. Apparently I'd been shouting out in my sleep what I had been shouting in the dream, and I'd scared the crap out of him! He thought he was doing me a favor, waking me from a nightmare. To be honest, I was actually sort of annoyed at him. I had been so close to finally ending the fear. Whether I would have been gulped down by a monster or whether I would have slapped the shit out of it and sent it packing, who knows. But I was finally gonna get rid of the it, confront it, run it from my home.

Okay, so you're asking yourself - what's to LIKE about a dream like that!? Because yeah, it was really frightening. When my husband woke me up, my heart was pounding and I could feel the adrenalin of what I had been about to do racing through my body. You'd think I would have turned on the light or gotten out of bed or tried to avoid falling back to sleep after that. My husband did, and he hadn't even been there, in the dream.


But I just turned back over, pulled up the covers and laid there, smiling in the dark. I felt good. Scared as I might have been, like the Scoobies, I hadn't let the things that go bump in the night, vampires or zombies or in this case, the demons in the dark corners of my own mind, scare me from taking them on. I had been ready to kick some psychological ass! The last thing I remember thinking before I drifted off to sleep again was - "It's about time."

I guess I'm busy cleaning house in more ways then just the physical.