Pretty much everyone dreams. I mean, don’t quote me on that.
I didn’t fact check or anything, but I’m guessing it’s mostly true.
Husband rarely remembers his dreams, while I have them
pretty much every night and can remember them, for the most part, in more detail
than I usually care to. I can’t always coherently articulate them, but I know
what happened.
Sometimes this is good….I learned to fly and some hot famous
guy was offering me ice cream and other euphemisms for sex, and other times it isn’t…..I’m trapped in a small cabin in the
woods surrounded by bears my only means of escape is through a maze full of
dinosaurs. True story.
Unfortunately, the latter seems to be more often the case.
As far as I’m concerned, I have more than my fair share of nightmares that wake
me up in a panic, end in a murder, involve alien takeovers of the world, or
have me discovering severed heads in a fridge in the basement of a haunted
house where I’m being chased by all manner of unpleasantness. I usually don’t sleep
well.
There have even been a few dreams that would have made
amazing story lines for a book or movie….now if I only had the patience to write
more than a few hundred words at a time. And dialogue. I suck at dialogue.
All this said, the real pain in the ass dreams are the ones
where you’re not really sure if you’re awake or not. Where you can’t be 100%
sure if you are driving a rally car or if what you’re driving is actually your
unimpressed cat, who is being used as a makeshift steering wheel. It’s the
dreams where you are just asleep enough to be nonsensical, but still be fully
committed to whatever it is you’re doing.
To date, I don’t think I have ventured so far down this path
as to enter the hazy world of sleepwalking, but regrettably, this doesn’t mean
that my own sleep difficulties haven’t impacted Husband to some degree. And while driving the cat was the first
recorded incident of my acting out while being only sort of awake, it was by no
means the most dramatic, although I imagine that cat would have disagreed with me.
There have been a number of nights where I’ve woken up and
been convinced something has happened that hasn’t. For example Husband did not actually take up smoking or move in with a gay dance
instructor, so it probably wasn’t necessary to yell at him first thing in the
morning. I see that now.
And then there was the night a few years ago when I woke up,
started screaming at the top of my lungs (I’m sure the landlord living upstairs
LOVED that), threw all the blankets off the bed and sat on my pillow shrieking
incoherently.
Husband, who at the time was sleeping like a normal person,
jumped out of bed looking thoroughly confused and tried to get me to use real
words to describe what had happened. All I could manage at the time was to
screech and point at the jumbled pile of our blankets at on the floor at the
end of the bed.
Being the remarkable (and extremely tolerant) man that he
is, he began shifting through the mess of sheets looking for….what? Finally he
looked at me (I was still curled up on my pillow stammering and pointing like a
fool) and said “I can’t find the spider. It’s probably gone now anyway”
 |
| Small cat, big spiders |
Back story…..our basement suite where we lived at that time had HUGE fucking spiders.
Big like small cats. I put one through the washing machine once and was a bit
concerned that it wouldn’t die. It did, but that’s beside the point.
I stopped dead and looked at him like he was the crazy one
in this situation. “Spiders? No. There were snakes coming up the bed. I threw
the blankets off so they wouldn’t get us.”
Yeah. Snakes. A fuck ton of them.
The weird part for me is that and as soon as I said it out
loud to him, I knew it was insane, but at the time it was incredibly real. It’s
like my brain had temporarily forgotten the part where I woke up. My brain is
an asshole.
The next time this happened I was ready for it. There I was lying
in bed and one of those big ass spiders came crawling out from under my pillow
and went right under Husband’s.
I think the rational response to this would have been to scream at
the top of my lungs again, wake Husband, and let him deal with it….I will take
care of normal spiders, but these things were more like 8 legged tanks on
methamphetamines, and no thank you.
But no. I’d been here before, and there was at least a 50%
chance that I was imagining this, and the hulk-spider wasn’t real. But could I
take that chance?
Maybe. It was going AWAY from me after all. And who knows,
maybe it wasn’t real. Or it was and it was plotting to eat me and my cat. You can't just go to sleep after that…what if it comes back. But I didn't want to wake
Husband for no reason….
And on and on this internal struggle went.
Finally I arrived at what I determined was a perfectly sound
and logical solution.
I got out of bed, got a pair of socks, and shoved them
under his pillow.
I have no idea what I thought this would accomplish. I’m
guessing my sleep-addled brain determined that I would take away the spider’s
little spider highway, and it wouldn’t come back. The socks would stop it. It
never once occurred to me that a single pair of socks shoved under a pillow was
in no way a foolproof spider trap, especially when it only blocked one
direction, but fuck it, I went back to sleep.
The next morning Husband was rather confused as to why there
was a pair of socks under his pillow. My explanation did nothing to alleviate
that confusion, and there was no spider to confirm my sighting. To this day I
truly don’t know if I dreamed it or if the spider was there and simply
outwitted my one way sock trap.
Creepy.
Happily to date there have been no more of the
uber-realistic dreams where you are fully convinced that there is a
flesh-eating wombat crawling towards you dripping in unicorn tears, and the
only reasonable response is to yell at it in broken Japanese. I still have
incredibly weird and scary dreams, but at least I wake up….and know I’m awake.
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