A No-Sleep Weekend (Not for lack of trying)
I can't satisfy my sleep needs this weekend. I don't know why, but I keep feeling tired, falling asleep, and waking up just as tired. This goes for napping as well as the regularly scheduled evening sleep. When I do manage to sleep, I have difficult dreams that I can't remember clearly once I'm awake again. Sarah says that I toss and turn when I dream like that. That's probably why I don't feel rested.
Have you ever had a dream so vivid and strange that you remember it for years afterwards? I have a history with such dreams. I even have a recurring fever dream.
I dreamed, when I was about 8 years old, that I had accidentally bought a pair of time-traveling pants. I don't know why I was buying pants at 8 years old, but I had. They made me invisible to the past, and I could travel in both time and space. Now, you might have expected dinosaur-obsessed little-me to head straight for the Cretaceous. Oh no. I apparently time-traveled back to 1975 to watch my Dad eat dinner with his family as a teenager, then go on a date with my younger mother.
This dream was so vivid that I have remembered it for over 20 years. I can remember what the table looked like, and the lighting of the room. I can remember the kitchen, and the foot stool my grandmother used to reach the tallest shelves in the cabinets. I remember the fuzz of a mustache on my young father's unshaven lip. My father had a mustache my entire life, until the chemo. I imagine that if he had a defining characteristic, that was it. Bit of a porn stache, really.
It's so odd to me that I still remember this dream. With the fever dream, I know why I remember it well. Because every time I had it, I woke up screaming. It was always the same, right down to the little details. As a kid growing up in the 80s, I regularly had anxiety dreams about nuclear war. This dream started out like those. It started out in a large metal bunker, somewhere deep underground. It looked like a set from the Matthew Brodwick film, War Games. There i s a count down going on, and I am staring at a massive set of blast doors, heavy steel, three stories tall. The count down ends, and the doors begin to grind aside. And I stare at a giant yellow sphereoid. No, not a sphere--an egg yolk. It glows orange, and I scream and scream, because I know it means the end of all life. And then I wake up.
I have had that dream, off and on throughout my life, since puberty. I wonder what it means? The surprising thing to me about my dreams is their lack of imagination. They often dealt with the supernatural, the surreal, but they failed to ever really show it. Whenever there would be a monster in my dreams, I would be terrified to see it, and when I did, it turned out to be something ordinary, lust a person. Once, I dreamed that my father had an evil twin who had a goattee who would kill me if he caught me, and he was chasing me down a hallway with red carpet. I pretty much blame that one on Star Trek.
But I couldn't time travel back to the dinosaurs, because for some reason, my dreaming mind has a special effects budget of about $4. I can picture such things awake, but I always fail to have those wonderful dreams where all of reality is suspended. Even in my flying dreams, I can only glide, and it's a wonderful feeling, still, but I envy those who can actually launch into the sky and soar above everything. All I ever get to do is run and jump and glide several inches above the ground for a couple of yards. I always wake up positive that I can do it when I'm awake too, but it never works when I try. That's worse than the fever dreams, in some ways.
And then there's the dream of love. I had crushes on girls as a teenager simply because I dreamed I was dating them. I had no interest in them awake, or at least I didn't think I did, bam, a dream where we kissed or something silly, and then I woke up absolutely smitten with them. It was awkward, to say the least. Those have gone away with time.
Tell me about your dreams. What haunts your mind while you sleep? What are the themes that your mind returns to, time and time again?
Comments
Subscribe to this entry's comments.
I can smell in my dreams sometimes. I've smelled jalapenos growing in my garden and I've smelled chocolate cake. It's so strange, I must have been sleepwalking, yet there was no cake in the fridge. Often I'll have bad dreams of carnage and I can smell blood. Those dreams are not as much fun. I also have dreams in which I'm dreaming that I'm sleeping somewhere else, like in some strange bunk bed and I know that I'm in Arizona and I can feel the heat of the dessert turn cold. Often there are different alarm clocks in my different beds within a bed.
What haunts me? Well, in my sleep I'm scared that I will turn into an evil person, or last winter I dreamed of people that were alive that were immediately turning into huge metal tubes that were shiny and coppery. The tubes were then transformed immediately into gasoline. That was NOT fun! I was in the hypnogogic/lucid state at the time and while I knew I was dreaming I couldn't move, change, or wake up completely. I hated that I couldn't help the people. I had a bad dream recently where I had a retarded sister and she was slowly turned into blood cheese. She had no idea what was going on just kept acting like her own idiotic kinda drunk self. She was called "The Cow". Go figure. Why I had that one I don't even think I want to know.
I have my best dreams usually the night or two before my period. They usually involve sex and falling in love. Sometimes it's with my husband sometimes with a stranger of either sex.
Sometimes I have dreams in which I am simply not me. For instance, once I was a man in my late 40s just walking down a hill at dusk. I had black pants on and a white button down shirt. I had straight black, short hair, and I was reaching into my pocket to get my car keys out. My car was white.
I used to lie awake at night and imagine that any rumbling, whether it be thunder, a truck, or a helicopter or anything like that that it was the sound of an atomic bomb exploding way off in the distance. My heart would pound so fast right out of my ears it seemed.