By Beauty Damned

Night Terrors

I dressed up as a black widow for a Halloween party last night. Then I dreamed that I was bitten by a black widow and my arm swole up and I had a horrible red and purple welt. It wasn't a real black widow. It was a mechanical one. Its fangs were metal prongs. Its red hourglass was painted on. Its legs and body were hard, black plastic. But it bit like a real spider and I felt the pain of the bite as if it were real. I felt my arm aching as if the poison were spreading. I felt relieved when I woke up that the spider wasn't real. I am really afraid of black widows. They scare me to death. Have since I was a kid and used to go to my grandparents' house in Phoenix where my parents would always say, "keep an eye out for black widows!" That terrified me. Of course I've seen hundreds of them in my life and I get the worst chills every time. I see them whenever I visit Oregon. Saw one in Portland recently. That is probably why they were in my head and I decided to dress up as one for Halloween and now I am having nightmares about them.

I have a tendency toward one dream which always feels different yet forever the same. I am in Oregon. I feel like I am on our land, in the Colestine, but it changes. The landscape changes. Sometimes it is trees and roads. Sometimes it is pathways and porches. Sometimes it is rocks and snow. I think it is a recurring dream, but the events are always new. Still, it is Oregon. Still it is the land. Still it is about my family and people I used to know. It's joy and sadness and fear. Maybe that is what is recurring. The same joys and pains and fears again and again, night after night, subconscious dream after subconscious dream, fueled by emotions that are on infinite repeat. I often have that dream of home. Perhaps I store all of the homesickness of the past six years away and it rears its head in my sleep.

A couple of nights ago I dreamed that Kathleen moved into an apartment in Santa Monica, a big highrise near the beach. We stood in the living room of her new apartment and looked out the big picture windows at the jewel-blue ocean. It was an astounding view. The waves were huge, and suddenly they were being pulled higher by the wind. Cyclones spun off the top of the waves as they broke. They rose higher and higher. There was a tsunami coming towards us. A giant wave pushed out of the ocean with a force I had never seen or vividly imagined before. It loomed over everything, crashing through the window of Kathleen's apartment, spraying glass and water everywhere. We ran from it, miraculously escaping as one can only do in a dream.

I woke up in disbelief that it was just a dream. I thought of the tsunami that hit Asia a couple of Christmas's ago and of Hurricane Katrina. I felt devastated at the thought that people have experienced such catastrophe in reality. Not just a scary dream that they could wake up from to a sense of relief, but a truth that could never be reversed or forgotten. I felt helpless laying there in my perfectly warm, dry bed, thinking about nightmares that become reality. A storm is blowing outside. It's a dark, windy day in Brooklyn. I have yet to set foot outside my house. I feel stupid for wanting to stay home tonight and wallow in bad dreams and every other ache and pain that I can muster, while Rob wants us to get dressed up and continue celebrating Halloween out on the town. For some reason, wallowing sounds like more fun.