Three-Dream Night
Dogged by Bad Dreams
There are some days you can’t help but carry your dreams into.
Last night my brain played host to a triumvirate of bad dreams. In one, I was hosting a family party and no one was speaking to me. In the dream, I told Sam that I thought it was because of my gray hair. My nephews and nieces think I’m old, I told him, no longer cool, irrelevant. Sam nodded. From the other room, I could hear my nieces and nephews laughing at me.
In the second, I forgot how to get onto Zoom to teach my writing class. I was back in my childhood home at the dining room table and couldn’t remember how to work a computer. I finally got online and on the screen were my students, in the middle of another class. In the dream, it was Wednesday, and I don’t teach on Wednesdays. Embarrassed, I signed off, telling them I’d see them the next day, but then I remembered I don’t teach Thursdays, either.
In the third, I was getting some kind of massive injection where I was being restrained in some fashion while a doctor poked a needle through my chest wall into my stomach.
Okay, that’s three for three upsetting dreams. How does one sail through the morning after being shunned, proven inept at work, and having a needle stuck into one’s chest wall? I lay in bed running through my checklist of subconscious fears. Fear of aging, fear of failure, fear of pain/death. I consider each. My hair’s definitely gray but that’s cool, right?, intentional, something I am working to embrace. I climb out of bed and check out Zoom, which I haven’t forgotten how to access. The injection thing, well, who knows? I figure it’s time to make coffee.
It takes a while for the dream fog to lift, but eventually, I’m walking the dog in the cold rain down a twisty North Carolina road, breathing in the scent of pines, thinking about what to have for breakfast.
Happily- and pretty much, invariably- the light of day overcomes even the darkest three-dream night.