semi insomniacs’ site

This is the stuff that good creative writing is made from. Have you ever woken up from one of your dreams and been both amazed and horrified by the content of these nighttime stories? What was my mind thinking about when in my dream I opened the kitchen cupboard to find my grandson’s face smiling at me from a narrow shelf?

Yesterday I woke up dreaming about going on a long road trip with my daughter when she was a child. But she is now 34. In the dream we kept packing and unpacking the car and it was getting late. My dream was so specific. I knew we had a nine and a half hour drive ahead. At one point my daughter came out of the house with a gallon sized tub of mint chocolate chip ice cream and announced that it would be her snack for the road trip. We had no cooler. And even if we did….!

I do remember the scariest dream of my childhood. It was a classic…ran in a loop through my young mind and haunted me well into my thirties. It involved a ghost chasing me through my childhood home and I always woke up before anything significant happened. The chasing itself was terrible. Running for my life inside my childhood home. No one ever rescuing me. Why did this dream suddenly stop?

I went to a dream analyst for a short while to talk about this troubling stuff. After a few sessions she sent me home. I was fired from therapy! I think I gave too much push-back to her suggestions. I really don’t remember now why she didn’t care to have me as a client but I do remember that for the next ten years or so I didn’t do much dreaming. Good or bad. No did I do much sleeping.

It’s a struggle: the stuff of the mind chasing us around at night when we should be sleeping. The stuff of the daily headlines worse than any Casper ghost in a white sheet. For me, it comes and goes. That peaceful reckoning I have with my distress. Yes. There are good days and some not so good ones. We have good dreams too, but they likely do not hold our attention in such a strong grip.