Just lost my blog post- now that’s a bummer! With no warning whatsoever, Windows Internet
Explorer closed taking my blog and several other works in progress with
it. Oh, God, I think one may have been a
job application! I will reconstruct-
Last night I had a bad dream; about automobile accidents and bloody
bodies. It is a dream that recurs in
various forms. This time I was neither driver
nor passenger in the wrecked car, so while disturbing, the dream did not wake
me. Not only that, the alarm did not
wake me for ten minutes! I stayed up way
too late to finish a novel.
Once a long time ago I had the car accident dream, and my niece
died in a car accident. I won’t say it
was at the exact same moment, but I found out about her death while still
shaken from the dream. Since then,
accident and disaster dreams leave me on edge, waiting for the other shoe to
drop. And I still worry, as we did in
childhood, that if I die in my dream I will die in real life.
Do you dream? I hope
you dream; I hope you dream in color, dear reader. I am a dreamer; day as well as night;
although the night dreams are darker. In my daydreams I am a Walter Mitty-like
character*, but only at night do I face the firing squad. I’m
the only adult I know who still has night terrors; waking up screaming in terror
with no memory of any dream. Night
terrors are different from nightmares, which are definitely dreams. In my
dreams, there are monsters, ghosts, and all of the creatures that most leave
behind when they enter adulthood. There
are unseen assailants, gun-toting bad guys, alien spacecraft, as well as the
more common falling or arriving late for a test for which I have not
studied.
Daughter Ion seems to have inherited my tendency to
dream. Recently she dreamed that I was
flushing all of her clothes down the toilet, and they fit! They flushed successfully, too, without
clogging the toilet, which is how we know it was her dream and not mine. The dream gave me pause; does she think I am
that kind of mother? I, who have never
even censored what she wears to school, save occasionally begging her to wear a
jacket in winter so I don’t get arrested for child endangerment?
*Credit where credit is due:
Walter Mitty is a character developed by James Thurber in “The Secret
Life of Walter Mitty,” a short story first published in 1939. In high school our drama club produced the
play by the same name. In it, characters
smoked. Those of us with parts in the
play smoked joyfully with the sense of getting away with something wicked. I still feel that way when I have a
cigarette.
