on Dreams...

I'm a dreamer. A nighttime dreamer. A daytime dreamer even.
I have been aware of my dreams for a long as I can remember
When I was a kid there were lots of nightmares.
Lots of crying in the middle of the night.
Lots of waking and tiptoeing quietly through the night
waking my mom and slipping softly into the side of her bed right on the edge.
Just barely enough room.
It always took me a while to fall back asleep but there was the greatest comfort
of her being right there.
Sometimes she would lay with me,
if I woke loudly
and crying.
I hated it.
The dreams consumed me
They flooded my mind,
for the whole rest of the day.
The scenes good and bad were put together like a puzzle.
Never, almost never, anyway.
Some where powerful, like the time my mom died in a storm,
she was going through a divorce at the time.
That dream stayed with me for a long time.
As did the dream of the body floating near water when I lived in Arizona
only to read in a letter: "remember that kid who had the cool bus, I think his name was Matt, he fell asleep at the wheel and hit a tree with his bus!"
.There were the dreams like lifting my belly in real life to let
the dream turtle cross beneath me.
There were dreams of penguins who lived in my bedroom of water.
There were rarely funny dreams.
They were always intense,complicated, difficult to share,
for their stories were too twisted entwined and broken
to put them together.

I still dream.
I still have nightmares.
I'm better able to quiet myself,
to calm myself now.
Though just up until recently
my husband took the role of hushing me to sleep
after a few particularly bad dreams.
I often wake tired. mentally tired, because my dreams were just so intense.
It was like I never slept.

They still don't make sense.
Though there are times where I can fit a certain dream to reality and feel it's connection
But mostly they leave me tired, annoyed, and wondering what it means
Certain things trigger the nightmares, and more intense dreams.
Foods mostly.
I've learned to avoid sugar before bed and really eating anything at all before I sleep is a bad idea.

My dream last night went something like this:

While dropping my son off somewhere (school perhaps) a storm was brewing we decided to skip it
and headed home, a different home, two of his friends appeared. The skies grew dark the winds picked up
and then a speeding train was headed for the house. I ran and grabbed the youngest girls. we all stood by a wall. it ran into the house and came through then in a harry potter kind of way disappeared quickly into one of our walls.but did not break it just went into the house and out again. We knew it would happen again. We were scared. I tried picking things up and was balancing more in my hand than I could carry, I tried to throw a few things on the ground and instead through my phone out the window. Another train was coming. I quick jumped out the window grabbed my phone and just barely got back in the house before another train came through the house. It was scary, and frightening. There was more, so much more. But for now those pieces are lost.

As I laid there looking around my darkened room I revisited the dream. as I usually do, always trying hard to  find another thought to focus on. I know it's not real, but I always feeling as though it is. I always feel the same as I did in the dream. Till morning has come and I wake and all is well.  I used to look in dream books but my dreams never fit into them. they weren't easy to categorize so I gave up.

Sometimes I'm running, being chase and I can't I'm just running in slow motion, sometimes i'm fighting but cant move my arms. sometimes I wake but cant move my body. I may have flown, fallen once? I used to have this one dream every time I got a fever as a kid, a geometric dream, no people just these shapes, that may have been the strangest of them all. There were a lot of dreams in my twenties of the people I went to grade school with.  Even though I had moved away and rarely saw them.

What about you? Do you remember your dreams? Nightmares? Do they make sense?