brigid | Entries tagged with dream

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Last night I had a nightmare.

This is nothing new or unusual for me. I’m a very active and vivid dreamer who routinely sees in color and can taste, smell, hear, feel, etc everything that’s happening. I can feel the change in texture of a painted iron fence, from smooth paint to rough rust spot. I can feel the dry heat of the sun on my head and back and the cool lapping of lake water on my legs, complete with the feel of rounded pebbles under my feet, toes digging in and gripping them. I once had a very pleasant dream where I was just sitting in a field of tall waving grass, dry and golden, rattling seed pods, while the sun set. The sky was brilliant colors, the air cooled, the stars slowly came out. It was peaceful.

But most of my dreams are pretty awful.

They’re complex, with convoluted plot lines. I have a lot of anxiety dreams about being lost, losing something, having to find someone or something. I’m never where I need to be. Sometimes I can read in dreams, and I have read the most amazing stories and histories. Other times words and letters are a shifting jumble and I need to read them and I can’t make sense of them. I frequently have dreams about needing to call someone and being unable to work the phone, tension and anxiety mounting as various things go wrong.

On top of that, I also have nightmares. Often. Frequently. Several times a week. Sometimes several times a night.

I’m chased through dark woods by slavering beasts who want to rip me apart. I’m traveling through ruined cities, looking for supplies and evading bad guys who want to kill me. I’m hiding someplace small and dark hiding from something lurking right outside, waiting, being absolutely silent. I’m on the run from people, from things, who want to torture and kill me. There are spiders on me. There’s something under my skin. My spouse/parent/child is possessed by a ghost/demon and nobody knows but me and I have to fix the problem before it kills me. Something or someone is trying to smother me and I can’t breathe.

I live with terror.

And that terror usually involves bodily harm- protracted bodily harm.

I mentioned that I can feel things? Cool water and round stones and breezes and grass? That I can feel the soft flutter of a cotton skirt against my bare legs, or the tickle of a dry leaf falling and brushing my cheek? I can feel pain, too.

I lie with chronic insomnia. I have a hard time falling asleep and I have a hard time staying asleep. If something (or someone) wakes me up, it can literally take hours for me to get back to sleep. I’m tired all the time, I enjoy lounging in bed, but I hate sleeping. I need to sleep, but I hate it. I wake up exhausted, often no more rested than when I lay down, and frequently more emotionally drained. I realized when I was in high school that I had a lot of delaying tactics around going to sleep and wondered if it was because of my dreams, and I think that’s true. There’s 6-10 hours a night where I’m not in control and horrors come out and play, and that is very stressful.

Sometimes I realize I’m dreaming, and I try to take control and direct things. Sometimes that works and I can change things or switch to a different dream. Once, while having an anxiety dream, I got very frustrated and exclaimed that this was JUST LIKE an anxiety dream and I was OUT OF HERE and I literally walked away and into a different dream. But other times I freak out and think “Oh, this is JUST LIKE a dream” but then lose that thread.

The first time I went on Wellbutrin I started seeing results very quickly. One result was that I got tired and went to sleep and woke up feeling refreshed. I stopped taking Wellbutrin for reasons I can’t remember, but took a generic form years later that sadly did not have the same effect.

I don’t know why my brain goes into overdrive while I sleep. It’s not related to physical activity or what I eat or if I’m depressed or what I’ve been watching or reading or anything. It just… bam.

Bam.

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For whatever reason, Niko was up and down all night which meant a night of very interrupted sleep, which for me usually means weird-as-all-fuck dreams. Most memorable of them was a 2-parter that involved 2 abandoned buildings we (where “we” was me, Nesko, my youngest brother, and some other people) had recently gotten ahold of and were trying to figure out how to rehab them and what we would use them for. There was actual talk about ripping out walls, etc. Only we were all dressed like we were at a Vampire: The Masquerade LARP in the late 90s… lots of black vinyl and fishnets and eye liner and flannel and really appalling hair.

One of the two buildings had a very large room on the second floor that was all dusty floorboards and decaying plaster and lathe walls with chunks of plaster missing and the lathe showing ominously through, a big faded oriental carpet in the middle of the floor several tones lighter than it should have been from thick dust. It was a massive room with two incredibly worn out white wing chairs, and an attached nursery and bathroom. The windows were wooden framed with wobbly glass and iron counter weights. We were debating what to do with that room, especially. It had been billed to us as the master bedroom and I wanted to keep it that way, but everyone else wanted to subdivide it into smaller rooms for some reason having to do with a threat of some sort.

The lighting and everything was kind of horror-movie ish, and there was lots of dirt and grim and it was hard to actually see anything and all the wall paper on the walls looked like it had been soaking in tea for awhile.

The dream shifted, as dreams do, and I realized that I was Jeffrey Rowland from “Over Compensating” which is not something I have ever aspired to be. Some other people and I were holed up in a barn, but it wasn’t a very good barn… the walls of it were wood slats and the wood was gappy and had bits missing so you could pretty much see inside from the outside and see the outside from inside, and it would have been pretty much impossible to actually defend. I was sitting in the passenger seat of a car in this barn that was filled with junk, and there was something about breakfast so I got out of the car and then someone else came in and I yelled at them to get away from my car, so I went over to it again.

Only it wasn’t a car, it was a table that someone had made into a car by attaching casters to the legs and an engine and gear shift to the underside of the table. Because of the location of the shifter, it was impossible to read what gear you were in, but that didn’t really matter because instead of “P,” “D,” “R” etc it said “Child,” “dorito,” “coffee cup” and “lime.” (Yes, I can read in dreams about half the time.) These weren’t really, you know, very explanatory. I think there was a steering wheel, but I don’t remember. Someone my brain identified as The Sheriff burst in and I had to peel out of there and escape. I didn’t know what gear to use though! I cycled through them all, quickly, and managed to get out of the barn and drove down a country road.

Part of the problem with the table car was that the seat didn’t have wheels (although it seemed to move ok) and wasn’t actually attached to the table. It was just a wooden dining chair. So I had to keep stopping the car and scooting back into the chair because the table was pulling me forward so I was sitting on the edge of my seat. I had my foot hooked up under something on the underside of the table to try and keep it all together.

Then I woke up.

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… and the gear shift was marked “child,” “dorito,” and “limeR

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