Detailed, emotional dreams play in my night theater. Frequently, the plays have a theme, one to another night to night for a few days. No matter the characters or plot involved, I don’t quite belong. Sometimes I’m keeping a secret that would result in loss of esteem were it exposed. Other times. I skirt the edges of a gathering, not able to see what’s happening that drew the crowd. Don’t need Freud to figure out what that represents.
Watching as the clock nears 8:00 p.m., the earliest time I feel comfortable taking my night time meds, I imagine how sweet the sleep visited upon me with a low dose non-benzo anxiolytic, non-narcotic pain medication, and prescription sleeping aid I require to get even blocks of two to three hours’ slumber. It’s a wonder I dream at all, but I do. All my life I’ve had engaging dreams, the details of which I many times remember vividly. In rare, extreme cases, I have to tell my husband about the story I’d seen and starred in my head to unpack the intensity.
On terrible fibromyalgia days, the escape into dreams floats in front of me, a nebulous space waiting just for me. When I get to that dreaming place, I will be unencumbered by pain, nausea, fibro fog, or fatigue. Maybe I’ll feel as though I don’t quite fit, but that’s definitely preferable to real life fibro.
The dream adventures in which I find myself involve sun, ocean, and sand quite often, or dark , suspenseful scenes, dangerous at times. Although I’m active, my role is mostly wingman to the central character – until the going gets fiery, life-threatening and I’m all that’s left to take down the bad guys.
Many, many nights, I spend lengths of time harking back to my first profession as a teacher. Unfortunately, sometimes panic laces into the school-centered story. How sad is that? Most of the news references to schools, besides sports, seem to be school shootings. Columbine was shocking. The evil that took those little kids in the Sandy Hook massacre hit us like a brick wall, and we were certain something would be done to institute commonsense firearm laws, supported for years by a majority of Americans. Currently, mass shootings are commonplace, but then we watch the devastating scene of law enforcement officers of all kinds waiting outside Robb Elementary in Uvalde. I am so outraged on behalf of that community.
Given the pain and other fibro symptoms I have, and the combination of medications that allow me to sleep, with so many mass murders, no wonder my dreams spiral into panicky, deadly threats battle. In 2022, our country has suffered, on average, more than one a day. This is craziness! This is also not at all what I was thinking when I undertook to read and edit a draft about dreaming I’d saved. Glad I didn’t publish the original but “Oh my!” quoting myself reacting to the unexpected turn this conversation took. In the name of transparency, I’m publishing it all anyway.
Yes, I know I should watch less news but I am a curious woman.
SurvivingSara 