Welcome to My Nightmares

I dream every night. Usually they are vivid, in color, and dramatic. I don't always remember them, but my husband, at least once a week or so, wakes me to stop my yelling or screaming out in my sleep.

It's an unfortunate routine for him and tiring for me. My brain does not shut off well.

Last night was particularly bad. I woke myself up a few times talking aloud, and he woke me as well. "Wake up, baby, you're dreaming," he says. It usually takes me a minute to get back to this world.

In my dream, I had a chain around my neck. There was a mass of dirt before me, and it was full of dead bodies.

My job was to walk around this mass of dirt in a circle, stepping on the bodies, to crunch them down and make them rot faster.

Isn't that a horrible thing to dream?

As I trudged along, crying and sobbing, and noticing how awful it smelled, I looked in the sky to see a line of people coming to help me. My husband, my father, a couple of friends, and my physical therapist were walking along the sky, sort of like a popular vision of the fellowship in the Lord of the Rings:

Actually it looked a lot like this, except the sky was a brilliant blue behind the shadow figures, which I perceived as angels. I grew very excited and I tried to get my camera to take a picture of the people coming to save me as they came across the sky, but I could not reach my camera. When I looked back, they were gone.

So I kept trudging along my mound of dead people, but I had hope now.

Somehow, then, I got loose, and I found myself opening a garage door to reveal a doe and fawn laying in hay on a wooden floor. A voice over my shoulder said, "We have to get them out so we can lock you in there."

Holy crap on a cracker. I wasn't free!

I think that's about when my husband woke me.

Dreams are weird. I don't have a problem with the Lord of the Rings imagery - anyone who reads my blog knows I'm obsessed a bit with that - but the rest of it? It was very Holocaust-like, the trudging on mounds of death.

I haven't watched or read anything about World War II recently, so I don't know where that imagery comes from. Maybe these comments I see comparing each presidential candidate to Hitler brought it up, or maybe it was Bill Maher's reference to gas chambers last night when we watched a rerun of his Friday show.

Perhaps that was enough to trigger such an intense and ghastly image in my head.

I have a couple of dream books, one of which I purchased for the fine price of 35 cents new, bought, I think, when I was about 10 years old. It's a little "pocket book" that I've kept on my desk all of these years.

It says, if you dream of dead people, it "denotes affliction and mental suffering."

If you dream of angels, it "indicates prosperity, peace, happiness, and sweet fellowship."

Those two are odds with one another, eh?

To dream of chains "tells that enemies are trying to harm you, but you will escape their meshes. Being confined in chains predicts severe trials from which you will be extricated in time."

To dream of deer "foretells quarrels and dissensions. In trade it denotes embarrassment and failure."

Well, okay then. Lots to look forward to.

Fortunately, I do not believe that dream books tell you anything. They are fun to look at and sometimes, if I am lucky, a line in a dream book might help me figure out what a dream means.

But generally my dreams are simply weird and terrifying.

My husband says tonight we will not eat salad, which is what we had for dinner last night. He has requested pork chops and mashed potatoes.

That, he believes, will give him - and me - a better night's sleep.