Boudicca's Dream Works

I am at the point, where I don’t necessarily think it’s normal, but have grown accustomed. I don’t just dream. As my sister puts it, it’s like “living another life in your sleep.” Vivid, detailed, I swear I can probably smell in my dreams and not know it in an awakened state. The better frame of mind I am in, the more I’m cool with me and where I am in my life, the more I dream. When I’m depressed, forget about it. I am hitting a good cycle in my life, emerging from a very trying past few months fraught with stress from myriad things going on in my life, and I knew I was rising from it when I started to dream again.

It is tiring to dream so much. I awaken as tired as I was when I went to sleep. Sometimes more so. Depending on the intensity and frequency of the dreams, I can actually dread going to sleep. My mother has a saying that I adhere to, “If you tell someone about your dream, they won’t come true.” Superstitious or not, I don’t want any of my sleeping dreams coming true, good or bad. They have in the past, and I just flat out don’t like it. It completely creeps me out.

Last night I dreamt my youngest nephew died by being hit by a train. He’s 10 and was playing in some park that the fencing had been removed from and since it was Christmas time, the chainlink fence had been replaced by 4 foot candy canes. The park ran along side a railroad track. He and his faceless friends were standing near the candy canes waiting for the train to come by; it jumped the track and took him out. Only him. In this dream I went through all the emotions of what it must be like to lose a child in the family, sitting and talking with my sister in law and her husband, planning the funeral, talking to my kids about it, then consciously being thankful his grandmothers were not alive to witness such a tragedy as losing a grandchild.

Then I woke up. All day I’ve been in this funk. Hugging on my kids. To lose a child. I cannot think of one thing worse than that. Nothing.

So I did what I always do, I went to the gym and ran on the elliptical machine for 30 minutes, blasting Blink 182 through my headset, running from the inner demons that make these dreams appear at night.

What you read in my blog is 1/10th of 1 percent that runs through my head every waking minute. My mind doesn’t slow down in sleep either. I’ve solved programming problems in my sleep, awakened the next day, fixed the program and the solution worked. I’ve fixed work problems when sleeping. I’ve taken four (4) years of French between High School and College. My last semester of French in college, I would dream in French. I was not consciously fluent by any stretch.

Tonight I dread going to sleep. I don’t know what lurks there. The dreams are not usually bad. Just active. Just draining. But looking at both sides, I would rather be extraordinarily happy with where I am in life and dream a life at night, than be sad and lonely amongst people with no dreams at all.