I've been having some intensely odd dreams lately. Maybe it's because the end of the term is nigh, and there's so much work that needs to be done, but most likely won't be until next weekend because I'm terrible at sitting down and doing anything. Whatever the issue, it's been a long time since I've had and remembered my dreams.
When I was little (years 6-12, let's say) I had detailed and horrific dreams about monsters, demons, and all sorts of unsavory characters bringing about my demise in any number of outlandish ways. I was constantly terrified of going to sleep. My poor parents never completely understood what was going on, they thought I was afraid of the dark or something, and tried their best to placate me with reassurances and nightlights. More often than not, however, I would tear my whole bed apart in order to build a protective fort for myself, guarded by my impressive stuffed animal collection. The problem is that I could not be completely conviced that the things I dreamed about weren't real. I genuinely though that what I dreamed about could come and kill me in my sleep, like some Nightmare on Elm Street business, only I wasn't allowed to watch any scary movies because they fueled my crazy dream fire.
Around Jr. High, I want to say, I stopped having, or at least remembering, any of my dreams. At the time I thought this was some kind of blessing, but now I realize that it was probably the onset of sleep apnea, meaning that I was no longer getting very much sleep at all and should have been taken to the doctor. Oh well. I enjoyed my dream-free years, though in reality I was extremely stressed out. Seriously, imagine not getting any more than two to three hours of sleep a night (guesstimation based on later sleep tests) for years on end and guess how you'd cope emotionally. But I didn't understand any of that at the time, I just thought I was a little screwed up, but at least my night times were safe and sound. Oops.
I had a brief stint of dreams again in early college, oddly enough triggered by a conversation I had about dreams. A friend of mine had a bad one, the sort that effect you for the whole day, and I was trying to relate but having difficulty because I hadn't gone through something like that in so long. That very night I had a dream. It wasn't scary, either. It was very mundane, so much so that I wondered upon waking up if it had been a dream at all or just some stuff I'd done earlier the day before. I had dreams about filing paperwork and calling my parents, about having conversations or walking to the library. They were delightfully tame, but so realistic that I sometimes forgot to do things because I dreamed I'd already done them.
However, this was short-lived, and it wasn't long before I went back to nights of nothingness. It was only very recently that I was diagnosed with sleep apnea, and that breathing machine you're supposed to use is just plain awful, so I tend to avoid it unless I'm seriously not getting enough sleep to function. The past two weeks or so, though, I've started having dreams, so I figured, yay! I'm sleeping again, long enough and well enough to produce dreams! Again, I don't know why this has started up so suddenly. I'm also not sure if it's all that good or not, now that it's been going on a while.
See, it appears that I've come full circle, back to the haunting dreams I had as a kid. The most recent ones include having a miscarriage, attempting to escape from some man who wanted to kill me and preserve my body as a doll and, perhaps most disturbing, cleaning out a refrigerator with Bob Saget (it was a nasty ass fridge, too, and it was the real Bob Saget, not the cutesy nice one from Full House). I have no idea what to make of this stuff. The days of fort-making are far behind me, and this is the first time I've really dealt with bad dreams as an adult, so I'm not sure what to do. I'm not sure if I want them to go away, either, since that will most likely mean that I'm not getting enough sleep and I'll have to rev up that wretched CPAP.
Again, I don't have any real way to end this, so I'm closing out with some music. This song, "Trouble With Dreams" by Eels, is of course somewhat related to the topic at hand, but also has a sort of creepy, lulling sound to it that I just love.
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