I Have A Theory . . .
I have been having nightmares every night for the past couple of weeks. Sometimes merely unpleasant, sometimes truly frightening. Sometimes meaningless, sometimes fraught with subtext and inner pathos. I am sick of it.
You, like me, are probably asking "but why is she having them?"
As to that, I have a theory.
It could be bunnies.
Those of you who know about Aubrey Bunnsley, the vampiric stuffed rabbit that keeps my nightmares away, may be interested to note that he stopped feeding on my blood after that entry. However, that is when the nightmares began.
Matters became more complicated yesterday when, courtesy of my sweet husband, Bunnsley got a girlfriend (they will be married on Saturday), Audrey Jane. She looks a lot like Aubrey, only she is all white, and as near as I can determine, a girl. And she is equally evil, because last night I had the grandmother of all nightmares.
It was a tangle, a hellish melange of all the anxieties that afflict me in my dream state. I think it hit every single one. Reading this, you may well laugh - I hope you do - but you must remember that I am not making a word of this up.
I was back at my parents' house after a car accident, with no means of transport. I was in high school again, fat again, and married all at once. My husband was gone to who knows where, missing if you will. My parents were bickering constantly, people constantly came to interrupt me in my schoolwork which I could not, in any case, understand. My computer was ancient, with an amber text-only monitor and no keyboard.
Then someone abandoned a well-groomed cream and grey tortoiseshell cat that promptly adopted me, and needed my help to find a home. In the midst of all this chaos, I looked at the cat's name tag, saw she was from Louisiana, and tried to call the reward number.
The person on the other line pretended to have no knowledge of the cat, and eventually lapsed into unintelligible babbling and screaming, like a German toddler with Tourette's.
Then a fat, hairy man from a convention in California showed up at the door with a shih-tzu and a miniature pinscher and asked me to adopt them, too. He had interrupted me coming out of the shower. I was wearing only a towel. My current dog was there, stumping around on his three legs and begging for attention, fumbling my every step.
Miles away, the snakes were hungry. I could not find the frozen rodents in the freezer, because my mother had put them all down the garbage disposal in the sink.
While I attempted to find some rodents under the sink, some old friends of the family showed up with their new baby and asked if I would sit for them, and when I refused, when I blew up at this piling-on of unwanted responsibility, they left. After lecturing me on how not wanting children was very, very impolite. Snow began to fall, and I realized they had taken all the firewood with them.
I exploded, I ranted, I screamed, I threw things, I cried. Achieved in a dream the release I cannot achieve in real life.
My father upbraided me for treating guests badly, and I lashed out at him, screaming that I had no room, that everyone was mean to me at school, and nobody would listen to me. That the teachers didn't care, that they thought because I was intelligent that I would be okay, but it isn't true. All my doctors wanted to do was make me sicker until I had to sell everything I had to pay them. And my own parents wouldn't listen to me, either.
I think I was finally getting through to him when I woke up.
That covers every anxiety dream I have ever had, except one: the one where my grandmother (who is 89) is dead. But I had that one earlier last night, so I guess my brain felt a repeat was unnecessary.
Oh! Oh! I forgot one. The one where me or my husband is bitten by a venomous snake and dies. This one never fails to rouse twin feelings of amusement and dread in me. It's gallows humor. It could very well happen. And each time I dream it, I pray it isn't prescient. (I once dreamed that my cat was dead with no warning. I awoke the next morning to find that, indeed, the cat was dead with no warning. Ever since then I have mistrusted my dreams.)
I know that this really means I am doing important soul-work, that I am working through Issues. One cannot see visions in the utter black midnight of depression, or in the high noon of happiness. Only in twilight, on the way up and the way down, do we pass that grey horizon where the twisted shadows dance. I'm on my way back up, swimming through the murk. I understand it's a symbol of progress.
But it sucks.
My rabbits aren't working, dammit. DO YOUR JOBS, YOU FUZZY BASTARDS!
Aren't all of you glad you don't have to live in my head?
link
You, like me, are probably asking "but why is she having them?"
As to that, I have a theory.
It could be bunnies.
Those of you who know about Aubrey Bunnsley, the vampiric stuffed rabbit that keeps my nightmares away, may be interested to note that he stopped feeding on my blood after that entry. However, that is when the nightmares began.
Matters became more complicated yesterday when, courtesy of my sweet husband, Bunnsley got a girlfriend (they will be married on Saturday), Audrey Jane. She looks a lot like Aubrey, only she is all white, and as near as I can determine, a girl. And she is equally evil, because last night I had the grandmother of all nightmares.
It was a tangle, a hellish melange of all the anxieties that afflict me in my dream state. I think it hit every single one. Reading this, you may well laugh - I hope you do - but you must remember that I am not making a word of this up.
I was back at my parents' house after a car accident, with no means of transport. I was in high school again, fat again, and married all at once. My husband was gone to who knows where, missing if you will. My parents were bickering constantly, people constantly came to interrupt me in my schoolwork which I could not, in any case, understand. My computer was ancient, with an amber text-only monitor and no keyboard.
Then someone abandoned a well-groomed cream and grey tortoiseshell cat that promptly adopted me, and needed my help to find a home. In the midst of all this chaos, I looked at the cat's name tag, saw she was from Louisiana, and tried to call the reward number.
The person on the other line pretended to have no knowledge of the cat, and eventually lapsed into unintelligible babbling and screaming, like a German toddler with Tourette's.
Then a fat, hairy man from a convention in California showed up at the door with a shih-tzu and a miniature pinscher and asked me to adopt them, too. He had interrupted me coming out of the shower. I was wearing only a towel. My current dog was there, stumping around on his three legs and begging for attention, fumbling my every step.
Miles away, the snakes were hungry. I could not find the frozen rodents in the freezer, because my mother had put them all down the garbage disposal in the sink.
While I attempted to find some rodents under the sink, some old friends of the family showed up with their new baby and asked if I would sit for them, and when I refused, when I blew up at this piling-on of unwanted responsibility, they left. After lecturing me on how not wanting children was very, very impolite. Snow began to fall, and I realized they had taken all the firewood with them.
I exploded, I ranted, I screamed, I threw things, I cried. Achieved in a dream the release I cannot achieve in real life.
My father upbraided me for treating guests badly, and I lashed out at him, screaming that I had no room, that everyone was mean to me at school, and nobody would listen to me. That the teachers didn't care, that they thought because I was intelligent that I would be okay, but it isn't true. All my doctors wanted to do was make me sicker until I had to sell everything I had to pay them. And my own parents wouldn't listen to me, either.
I think I was finally getting through to him when I woke up.
That covers every anxiety dream I have ever had, except one: the one where my grandmother (who is 89) is dead. But I had that one earlier last night, so I guess my brain felt a repeat was unnecessary.
Oh! Oh! I forgot one. The one where me or my husband is bitten by a venomous snake and dies. This one never fails to rouse twin feelings of amusement and dread in me. It's gallows humor. It could very well happen. And each time I dream it, I pray it isn't prescient. (I once dreamed that my cat was dead with no warning. I awoke the next morning to find that, indeed, the cat was dead with no warning. Ever since then I have mistrusted my dreams.)
I know that this really means I am doing important soul-work, that I am working through Issues. One cannot see visions in the utter black midnight of depression, or in the high noon of happiness. Only in twilight, on the way up and the way down, do we pass that grey horizon where the twisted shadows dance. I'm on my way back up, swimming through the murk. I understand it's a symbol of progress.
But it sucks.
My rabbits aren't working, dammit. DO YOUR JOBS, YOU FUZZY BASTARDS!
Aren't all of you glad you don't have to live in my head?
link