Thursday, May 25, 2006

Recurring Nightmare Themes

I've always had very vivid dreams and rather creepy, detailed nightmares. Way back in the day, when I first started blogging (cue Conan O'Brien: "in the year 2000..."- actually, I started in 2001, but whatever), we had a group blog of our dreams and nightmares. It was so interesting.

Incidentally, all of Alissa's closest friends are total bitches in her nightmares. It's true. She has, on occasion, dreamed that I, like, screamed at her to hurry up while she was trying to simultaneously change a tire on the side of road and resusitate a kitten or something. I'm making that particular dream scenario up, but we are so *mean* in her subconscious. I'm just saying.

Where was I going with this? Ah, yes. My weird dreams. I dream ALL THE TIME about injured animals. I have this recurring dream where I forget I was supposed to feed, like, an entire barn full of dogs whelping litters of puppies. I remember, like, three days after I was supposed to start caring for them, and I run in and find a bunch of hungry, miserable dogs with newborn puppies in failing health, and IT IS ALL MY FAULT. In every dream, it's almost always just about too late to fix it, but not quite. In last night's dream, there was only one dog, and it gave birth to gerbils. When I didn't show up for two days, the dog hid the baby gerbils in different stalls in the barn, and I could only find two. And of course, the gerbils were in failing health when I got there. I wake up right before I find it if it's okay or not.

The other night I had a really terrible nightmare about a creepy guy hanging around my apartment who hurt Bella. Once again, I showed up right in the nick of time. It was awful.

Overall, it's probably my brain's way of working out anxiety, maybe orrying about responsilibities..? Maybe it's a belated dream about the convict who was living downstairs? I don't know. He's gone now. A middle-aged couple lives there now. They fight a lot, but not loudly. That sounds strange, I know. Every time I'm doing laundry on the second floor- the machine is in a common area outside their door- I hear them fighting in Spanish. They aren't yelling, just speaking contemptuously to each other in above average voices, but seriously, it's every. single. time I'm doing laundry.

Go figure.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Maybe you just subconsciously hate animals?

Alissa said...

oh my god. Just the other night I had one of those horrible friend dreams. Gwen was the star this time (Sorry, Gwen. Don't take it personally. Everyone gets to play from time to time).

So, in my dream I was at some comedy show, and halfway through the show the comedian had this big-screen projector thing, and he started putting up my emails, and he had emails that had some really, really embarassing stuff in them, and I started screaming at him to stop, and he wouldn't, and he kept going on to more and more emails and I was screaming and crying, and the audience was laughing, and when he finally stopped I turned around to the group of people I was with and asked them how he got access to my email account, and Gwen told me that she gave him my password, and I was SO ANGRY... and then I woke up and I was so mad that I couldn't go back to sleep.

But then a few nights later I had a dream where I went to a church thing, because Angie was doing a presentation in the church, and when we walked in there was a box for donations, so Todd gave me a few dollars, and I had a few dollars, and I put them in the box together. Later, Angie came up to do her presentation and said that everyone who put money into the box was entered into a drawing to win their choice of a trip to Jamaica, $10,000 cash, or a yellow VW Beetle, but you couldn't resell the car. And then she pulled the name and said that it was a couple who won, since they put their money in together, and I knew it was us, and then Angie read our names, and everyone was telling us to take the car, but I really needed the money, and I was afraid to ask Todd if I could have the money to pay back all the money I owe people, because I knew he really wanted the yellow car.

So then I decided that maybe my dream was telling me that if I wanted an answer to my money problems (which are very, very real)... that I need to go to church. Yikes.