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Thursday, May 17, 2012

Nightmares

As long as I can remember I have had extremely vivid dreams.  I remember when I was younger crawling into bed with my parents and later then telling me to crawl into bed with my oldest sister.  I would climb into bed with her and we would giggle and see who could hang the butts off the bed the furthest and then pull themselves back up onto the bed using only the rungs on the bed.  We would be "mountain climbing" onto her canopy bed.  I think I slept in there more than I did my own bed.


After I married my vivid dreams continued.  On our honeymoon, Hubby had his first experience with them.  We had seen a cockroach in the hotel we were at in Hawaii (apparently this is fairly common) and I had a dream about a very large cockroach in bed with us.  I jumped up, standing on top of the bed, and was freaking out.  Hubby threw back the covers to reveal the white sheets.  I made him completely strip off the top covers before I went back to bed.  Congratulations Hubby, you've married a nut job!


Well these are the type of nightmares I was having for the first couple of years of our marriage.  Then Sunshine was born.  Then the dreams changed.  In the first week home I was dreaming that she was in bed with us and I couldn't find her in the covers.  I was sitting up frantically looking in the covers saying, "Hubby, Hubby, I can't find Sunshine.  Where's Sunshine?"  He leaps out of bed and runs turns on the light and there she is, still sleeping in her bassinet next to our bed.  This is one of the reasons why I would never co-sleep.  


Vivid dreams; they can take you to wild and crazy fanciful places.  They can be fun and have you begging to fall back to sleep to see how they'll end.  Dreams can be so incredibly bizarre that they must be the basis for the strangest horror books.  You can wake from them still seeing them, hearing the voices, and leave you questioning if it was real or imagined.


A few years ago, my parents were talking about getting a pool.  I was pregnant with Bug, Monkey was 2 and Sunshine was 4.  I had them in swim classes and they had been in them for a while.  During all of this pool talk I had had a dream:


We were taking swim lessons again.  Sunshine was in the bigger pool while I was in the smaller pool with Monkey.  I was so tired though and really wasn't in the mood to go in the pool for yet another "Mommy and Me" swim class.  The swim instructor told me not to worry, that she would take care of Monkey and I should just rest.  I sat out in the little hallway outside of the swimming pool, waiting for the class to end.  After a while, the parents and kids started coming out of the pool area with the instructor being the last one to exit.
"Where's Monkey?"
She looks kind of surprised at my question and we all go running into the pool area.  We don't see him anywhere in the very small space.  I do, however, see our large stroller, it's the blue one that the car seat attaches to.  I run over to it and there, under the wheels and under the water is my Monkey.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry.  I forgot," says the instructor.
I cry and cry and try to get him out from underneath the stroller.


I wake up in my own tears.  That was a few years ago.


When you wake up from a dream, you're supposed to think that it was strange, odd, sad, scary, etc.  You think, "I should tell someone about that later on."  You might attempt to even write it down it never quite comes out right because dreams just don't seem to make as much sense when you're awake as they do when you're asleep.  So you decide that you should tell someone about it later on because the oddity of it is also worthy of being told and being laughed about.  Of course, half way through the day pieces of the dream are missing, holes in the story.  By the end of the night when your husband comes home from work and you go to tell him, there may only be the idea of the dream or it may have completely left your mind.  They are not supposed to linger, that's not how they're supposed to work.  They should disappear, be lost forever in the far corners of your mind.  Dreams should not keep you living in fear.


I tried to subtly convince my parents that they shouldn't get that pool.  The kids were too little to be trusted around it.  The pool would take up their whole yard, where would the kids and their dog run?  Did they really want to have to deal with it on a daily basis?  Apparently my arguments were to deaf ears and their question of, "We're thinking of getting a pool, what do you think?" was really a statement, "We're getting a pool.  Aren't you excited!"  My sisters both were, so were all of my nieces and nephews.  Now with summer coming, I will be watching the pool.  Every time they enter, I will be revisited by the memory of Monkey and the stroller.   Crowded pools, jumping children, floaty things trapped in the corner, will start a panicked search for the kids.


Yes, this is something I need to relax about, but how do you relax?  How do you relax when relaxing could cost you so dearly?

Vicky

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