Dreaming My Dreams

I am prone to nightmares. I have them quite regularly. Well, not as regularly as I used to, but they do pop up for me now and again. They seem to be my mind’s way of coping with stress and/or anxiety. I get through the day just fine, and then my psyche “works it all out” at night, so to speak.

Before having Zane, I might have several nightmares a week. Not every week, but enough that it was a fairly regular occurrence, and I had developed a bag of tricks to get back to sleep.

Also before I had Zane, I had recurrent insomnia. Now, not so much. I sleep hard these days, and even if I have nightmares, they’re not enough to wake me up, and I don’t remember them.

But they do occasionally come back – in enough force to cut through my sleep-deprived haze and wake me up sweating. Such was the past week.

Now, I know you’re thinking…what does this chick have to be stressed out and anxious about? I know. But let me tell you the things that are affecting my life right now: Paris Hilton is going to jail, there are only three new episodes of Heroes left, the ugliest bathroom in America is upstairs and no closer to being remodeled than it was 3 months ago, and I keep forgetting to pick up my dry cleaning.

You know, the typical middle-class angst stuff here.

But actually, it turns out that I’m stressed about a few other things as well. The whole best friend with breast cancer thing, Zane’s asthma is flaring so we’re back on the dreaded Orapred, I still have a liver tumor – which is only stressful in the way of I still can’t eat a whole lot, I was out of town several days last week and Zane didn’t do so well, and I will be leaving again next week for a longer period of time. And, seriously, I keep forgetting to pick up my dry cleaning.

So it is with no surprise that the nightmares have been coming back.

I have found in my late night ruminations about my dreaded dreams that my nightmares – the bad ones, not the make-me-a-little-anxious-but-I-can-fall-back-to-sleep-easily ones – have three recurrent themes.

1. Snakes. Most of the nightmares I have where I’m just plain out terrified involve any number of legless reptiles. Their little slithering bodies freak me out in my waking hours, but at night they come in multitudes and hordes and slide into my dreams and wreak havoc on my sleep-itude. It is such a deep-rooted fear that if I even happen to see a snake during the day (say for instance, on some nature show, I will almost certainly have a nightmare about snakes that night – unless I stop for a few moments and watch the show and have a little conversation with myself. The conversation goes something like this: Self, don’t dream about snakes tonight. I know you just saw one on TV, but that’s no reason to let them into your dreams tonight. Some days, Self actually listens, and the wee beasties don’t invade. Other days, I’m not so lucky.

2. SRH cheating on me. So crazy, this one. In these nightmares, I find out that SRH has cheated on me, and he’s NOT.SORRY.AT.ALL. In fact, he’s done with me, and he can’t imagine what he ever saw in me. This completely hearkens back to the days when I couldn’t find a faithful boyfriend to save my life. I always went for the hot guys who knew they were hot. And I knew they were hot. And, of course, other women knew they were hot. And pretty soon, I was cheated on.

This, however, is not SRH’s “in real life” M.O. He’s hot, sure. But he’s a faithful kind of hot, and let’s also not forget that he’s a wee bit lazy. So he probably wouldn’t ever make the effort to cheat because, well, it involves effort.

But in my dreams, man, he looks at me like I am filth from the bottom of his shoe. Like I am less than nothing. And I feel awful. Like the teen-agey, this is the worst thing in the world, I may never recover kind of awful.

I’m always kind of mad at him when I wakeup from those ones.

3. I cheat on SRH. While this one sounds like a little more fun on the face of it, I never actually get to enjoy the cheating on SRH. The dream always begins after the fact, so I’m left feeling all the guilt that a cheating partner would, but I don’t get the glorious moments of illicit consummation. So, I enter the dream at the point where I’m trying to figure out how I could do such an awful thing to such a wonderful person. Cue the self-loathing. And then I have to decide whether I’m going to tell SRH that I’m a horrible person who doesn’t deserve him but if he’ll just give me one more chance I will try my hardest not to be the low down dirty tramp that we both know that I am. But even if I don’t tell him, I know that I have messed up the best thing to ever happen to me…

I think these dreams might be worse than the ones where he cheats on me. Ugh!

And while the snakes are clearly just a manifestation of my primal fears, I think it may be time to pull out my “used to be a therapist” credentials for some deep dream analysis of the other two scenarios. (Never mind that I wasn’t a Jungian therapist, and that I’ve never had any type of training in dream interpretation.)

I’m hypothesizing that my cheating/cheated on dreams reflect my deep fears that, um, my life may be careening wildly out of control right now. It isn’t really, of course. Sometimes it just feels that way – what with all the tumors/cancers/health concerns that are going on in my vicinity. And when you’re world is being rocked (as mine is right now), your biggest fear is that the rug will be pulled out from under you. And SRH – our relationship – is my rug.

But let’s not to get too deep, folks. They are just dreams. They don’t say anything about the state of my relationship. They simply reflect my irrational fear of impending doom.

And this is why I hate the whole sharing of self-insights kind of talk. It just makes everyone think there are deep, twisted things happening in my psyche.*

Okay. Moving on. As a complete attempt to get away from any seriousness talk, I wanted to thank everyone for the birthday wishes. Today is my 33^rd birthday, and since three is one of my lucky numbers, I am hopeful that this will be a very good year.

Now, if I could only get a good night’s sleep!

*And everyone becomes just a bit clearer on why I am a former therapist.