By Beauty Damned

Nightmares

Boyfriend wrote me an email saying he was sorry. Hmph. For being critical and that he is only trying to help me become a better person, which is what we should both be doing for one another. Which is true I suppose, but my best trait has never been the acceptance of criticism, regardless of whether or not it is "constructive". I cannot distinguish one kind from the other. It's all the same to me.

Well, I'm over it anyway. I went home and got a good night's sleep...oh except for the terrifying nightmare I had around one o'clock in the morning. I had to force myself awake and remind myself that I was in my bed in my apartment in Brooklyn. I think I dreamt I was in Oregon and something horrendous was about to happen to me. I don't remember what, but for some reason, just the idea that I was not in my own house or that I was back in Oregon was something I had to fight with myself to overcome as I was trying to unglue my consciousness from the bad dream.

As I willed my eyes to open and see that I was safe, I could hear the kittens in the living room and that felt like a huge comfort to me. I breathed deep relief and reluctantly allowed myself to fall back asleep. Luckily, the nightmare did not return, though I did continue to have peculiar dreams for the remainder of the night. I wish I could remember them.

You know what used to make me crazy when I was a little girl? I was a very acquisitive child with an insatiable desire for candy and clothes and money and other material things. I dreamed often of obtaining these things. The disappointment that I felt when I would awake to find that the candy bars I had collected in my dream or the closet full of brand new dresses were gone was almost too much to bear. I would try very hard to grasp onto those things and yank them through the barrier between dreams and reality to make them tangible, to no avail of course. I would many times convince myself that I was not dreaming at all. Unfortunately, my waking hour would shortly arrive and I would once again be defeated in my quest to capture my dream possessions.

Luckily, I never have these dreams anymore. Nor am I a solicitous child who will go to any lengths to get what I want, which is probably a major reason that those types of thoughts and desires are no longer affixed to my subconscious. It's a lovely thing. Growing up.

I used to have a lot of dreams about vampires when I was really little. My best friend was a huge instigator, as she informed me that those who do not where metal clamps or at the very least a heavy scarf around their neck as they slept would be attacked by vampires. This was also during the time that Richard Ramirez, The Nightstalker, was murdering people not far from where I lived and I was consumed with the fear that he would come and get us. Luckily, neither Dracula or the Nightstalker materialized in my room and my dad told me to visualize the object of fear and then say "I don't believe in you, I can blow you away" he said then if you close your eyes and blow very hard, the sinister thing will be cast off. He was right. It really worked. I decided then that my dad was definately someone I could count on to take care of any bad things that came my way.

Then when I was a teenager I had a series of bizarre nightmares about the old people in the building next to me turning into zombies and coming to get me. In one dream I even gouged an old lady's eye out with a fork and then she turned into a Marge Simpson doll but she was still bleeding. Nice. Another one featured an old decrepit woman reaching her arm through the bars on my window to grab me and I hacked the arm off with an axe. Gory shit man. God I have had some weird dreams. I remember so many of the old ones. It is the new ones I have a hard time recalling. It bothers me...

Posted by Maria at January 15, 2003 11:05 AM | TrackBack