Bad Dreams

I awoke early this morning, my heart pounding, from another bad dream. This is the second time I have woken up this way in a week and the third time this month. I don’t like it. Unfortunately, I am the only one who can make it stop.

I don’t usually have particularly vivid or memorable dreams. In fact, my experience has been that when I do remember my dreams it is because there is some message there that my conscious mind is blocking so my unconscious (subconscious?) has to get sneaky and find a way to get the message to me. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve been living with this body and mind for a while now and kind of have an idea how it operates.

I figured out the dream message thing some years ago when I noticed a strange pattern. I’d be having a normal, everyday, boring dream and then a very strange out-of-place image would appear, like a bearded man wearing a beautiful blue evening gown sitting at a booth in a café. The odd image would catch the attention of a non-dreaming part of my brain, essentially telling it, “Pay attention now. Incoming message.” When I woke up in the morning, I’d remember the dream after the strange image and it would usually offer some insight into whatever was going on in my life at the time.

If I didn’t “get the message,” the dreams would continue, becoming progressively more vivid. If I still didn’t get it, there was a good chance they would turn into nightmares; for me, the psychic equivalent of someone shaking me and saying, “Hey! Shut up and get the f*cking message already!” Once I figured out what I needed to know, the dreams would stop pestering me and my dreamlife would return to normal.

With all the stress in my life over the past nine months (scoring over 300 on life event stress scale), I have not had a good night’s sleep in ages. Turning the mind off to stop worrying about all the problems and deadlines has proved nigh impossible. Physical aches and pains have contributed to the lack of sleep, as well.

I’ve recently started wearing earplugs at night, hoping that blocking out the sounds of the cars racing up the street late at night, the braying donkey, the barking dogs, the snoring hubby and dog, and the other lip-smacking dog will help me get a decent night’s sleep. It has. And I think that’s when the bad dreams started.

So, what message am I not getting? The last two dreams I can remember involved me racing to get somewhere, knowing that I would arrive too late and there would be dire consequences to this. Before I even arrived, I woke up both times with my heart pounding in my chest.

I am not sure what I am supposed to gather from these nightmares. I already know that I am way overdue for a vacation and some relaxing downtime. I am trying to wrap up commitments affecting my schedule. The only self-imposed commitment on the calendar is a yard sale planned for early December. We wanted to have it last weekend but did not have time to pull it together. A yard sale is a LOT of work and I still haven’t even had time to finish sorting through everything to get rid of more.

I could push this yard sale onto next year’s calendar, but then it wouldn’t be worth having until probably March or April to allow the weather to warm up and people’s budgets to recover from Christmas shopping. The problem with putting it off is that the storage unit for all this stuff costs $60 per month and I really want to eliminate that expense. Without the shed, we have no storage at the house for everything we don’t want. Therefore, I really want to have this yard sale and be done with it. The leftovers can be crammed in the other storage unit we’re stuck with until we move since we can’t put a shed up here.

Does this mean I have to suffer through bad dreams for another two and a half weeks until my calendar clears up? Sheesh, I hope not. I want to go back to dreams that aren’t worth remembering or that gently deliver their message.

I could handle another dream like the one I had a dozen years ago that delivered a completely new and original recipe to me; one that included ingredients I never buy. I wrote it down and tried it. It was interesting and pretty tasty. Here it is for you to try, if you'd like something a little different.

Dream Salad

1 head butter lettuce, clean and torn
Pear, diced
Walnuts
Pickled beets, drained and julienned
Reserved beet juice
White wine
Sugar
Basil
Black pepper
Frozen phyllo shells

Bake phyllo shells and let cool.
Combine beet juice, white wine, sugar, and seasonings in small saucepan. Simmer over medium heat to reduce by half. Let cool.
Toss together lettuce, pear, and walnuts.
Fill phyllo shells with salad, sprinkle with julienned beets, and drizzle with sauce. Serve immediately.