Bad Dreams
Seven-ish hours of sleep, but nope, not dozing off again, I'm good.
I dreamed of staying in a swanky hotel with Coyote, but it was far into the afternoon. We'd long missed checkout and were going to be charged for another expensive night, but we hadn't even started packing up to go home- there were clothes everywhere.
Coyote'd just come back, he hadn't been hanging out with me much and this was supposed to be a vacation just for us. He was annoyed with me and I was absolutely livid, but in that place of anger where I knew yelling would do no good. It's awfully strange to feel completely worn out while asleep.
In the second dream, I was stuck among a group of people that had been taken out of our lives. We were kept in a constant loop of flying from one coast to another in odd spaceships, never allowed time to enjoy the place we were, never allowed to have any contact with our friends or loved ones. To them, we'd just vanished without a trace. Some people tried to rebel in various ways, tried to escape or crash the ship. I watched them be killed by the aliens and tried to steel myself to this monotonous, pointless, loveless existence.
In the third dream, the aliens had planted monsters among its cargo of humans. Screams and vicious deaths abounded. My point of view shifted to watching three plucky boys try to deal with the horrors, but I voluntarily moved away, knowing that watching them be torn apart by the green, slimy, winged Cthulu-like creatures would devastate me. Instead I watched a family whose sanity kept slipping. They'd have shared delusions that they were home and safe, only to realize they weren't. Then they'd have a shared delusion that they had a weapon, some sort of welding machine, maybe? It shot hot fire out of one tube. But that didn't exist, either, and the monsters were close now.
I woke up with relief to be out of there. Probably not a delusion, right?
My instinct is still to call horrors like these "anxiety dreams". As horrified as I was during them, it's nothing like the hell that PTSD victims face. I'm hardly like Tiger, returning to the war in Iraq. I don't wake up screaming or covered in sweat or twisted up in the sheets and blankets. If that level of nightmare exists, mine must all be something far more minor.
I'll recharge my trusty dreamcatcher and see if that helps. Most likely, it's just holiday stress and things will be lots better in January.
I dreamed of staying in a swanky hotel with Coyote, but it was far into the afternoon. We'd long missed checkout and were going to be charged for another expensive night, but we hadn't even started packing up to go home- there were clothes everywhere.
Coyote'd just come back, he hadn't been hanging out with me much and this was supposed to be a vacation just for us. He was annoyed with me and I was absolutely livid, but in that place of anger where I knew yelling would do no good. It's awfully strange to feel completely worn out while asleep.
In the second dream, I was stuck among a group of people that had been taken out of our lives. We were kept in a constant loop of flying from one coast to another in odd spaceships, never allowed time to enjoy the place we were, never allowed to have any contact with our friends or loved ones. To them, we'd just vanished without a trace. Some people tried to rebel in various ways, tried to escape or crash the ship. I watched them be killed by the aliens and tried to steel myself to this monotonous, pointless, loveless existence.
In the third dream, the aliens had planted monsters among its cargo of humans. Screams and vicious deaths abounded. My point of view shifted to watching three plucky boys try to deal with the horrors, but I voluntarily moved away, knowing that watching them be torn apart by the green, slimy, winged Cthulu-like creatures would devastate me. Instead I watched a family whose sanity kept slipping. They'd have shared delusions that they were home and safe, only to realize they weren't. Then they'd have a shared delusion that they had a weapon, some sort of welding machine, maybe? It shot hot fire out of one tube. But that didn't exist, either, and the monsters were close now.
I woke up with relief to be out of there. Probably not a delusion, right?
My instinct is still to call horrors like these "anxiety dreams". As horrified as I was during them, it's nothing like the hell that PTSD victims face. I'm hardly like Tiger, returning to the war in Iraq. I don't wake up screaming or covered in sweat or twisted up in the sheets and blankets. If that level of nightmare exists, mine must all be something far more minor.
I'll recharge my trusty dreamcatcher and see if that helps. Most likely, it's just holiday stress and things will be lots better in January.