Last night I dreamt I was walking somewhere. I’m not sure of my destination, but what I recall is walking through slush, like you get after it’s snowed, the snow has sat of days and gotten dirty and is starting to melt. It was about six inches deep and my legs were tired and arthritic. They’d barely bend at the knees. My entire body felt heavy as if the force of gravity had doubled. I could barely move and it was exhausting just trudging along, destination nowhere.
In the wee hours of this morning, I have the standard dream I have when I feel my life is out of control. It’s the overflowing toilet dream. I’ve had variations of this dream for many years. This one is particularly gross however. I’ll spare anyone who reads this the details. But, it’s the “my life has gone to shit” dream again. I hate this dream, but it’s become familiar. It’s always slightly different in the location and the details, but it’s always the same. The scene shifts and I’m a soldier on a battlefield. Something has happened and everyone on my side is down. The enemy is walking through the bodies looking for any survivors. I’m on a ledge below a cliff and I’ve got to decide if am I better off screaming out and asking for mercy and hoping they will take me captive or do I hope they won’t see me here or do I wait for them to possibly put a bullet in me as I lie here helpless? I opt for saying something and one of them reaches down and gives me a hand up. But, immediately another guy runs over to me, grabs me and jumps off of the cliff trying to pull me down with him. I struggle to stay up but ultimately lose the struggle and we both plunge to our deaths. As he grabs me I figure out this is a civil war battle and I was a white guy on the side of the South. He is a black guy fighting for the North. Bizarre. Another scene change. I’m in modern times now and I’m walking across a big lawn somewhere. I see the guy who killed me and I we just say “Hi” as we pass each other. I then see a woman sitting on the lawn. She has two kids with her. One is about 10, the other about 6. The older kid is telling the younger one that he remembers what he called the “cold season” which I somehow know is the time he had between his last lives. I sit trying to overhear what he is telling his younger brother. Then, I look up and I see Shayna running toward me. She is not specifically coming towards me. She is just playing and happens to be running this way. She’s about four or five, back at the time when she was just a bit pudgy with her cute pudgy face. As she is running by, I grab her, lift her high into the air and tell her how much I love her. She starts crying. I cannot figure out why she is sobbing. She says she didn’t know anyone loved her enough to miss her the way I do and to express love for her like this. The whole thing lasts less than a minute, dream time. Then, I wake up.
Damn. Here I am back in my bed again. My dreams of Shayna are so infrequent and fleeting. I just want them to last. Every time I see her I try to hold onto her, but I always wake up. Every morning, for a just a little while the world seems OK. Then, I remember the world I am waking up into again. This time I burst into tears. Ty thinks I’m asleep and having a nightmare and tries to wake me. The tears never come in the dreams though. The tears are when I wake up. This is the nightmare.
