Sunday, February 21, 2010

what is my mind coming to?

Lately I've been having such vivid dreams I wake up and am not sure which is reality—lying in my too warm bed, sun sneaking in under the chocolate brown shades, or the sharp images burning into my mind, flashes repeating over and over as if my subconscious wants me to remember every last detail. Hours later, I can still see the airport from three nights ago, feeling the panic as we can't find the terminal due to construction, or the midtown lobby of two nights ago, Iz wandering out into a busy city street as I stand, at a broken elevator, with a suburban sized shopping cart filled with frozen food and no way to get to a register.

As we've been on winter break and everyone's sleeping later, these dreams have been more frequent. I'm still waking up at 6:15-ish, my usual anxiety-ridden wake up time, often with one of those powerful dreams still reverberating and then (this is new for me) fall asleep, waking up an hour or so later with another montage overloading my brain.

Disclaimer: this first dream graphic and bloody, in a period sort of way, so if the thought of that makes you queasy, this isn't the paragraph for you.

I woke up at 6:17 with this in my head (fortunately, it's starting to fade). I had my period. But, after taking a shower, I threw on a plush white hotel bathrobe—somehow I was on tour with the Jonas brothers—and was sitting in my suite, leafing through magazines. I heard someone knocking at the door and as I stood up, I realized I'd bled all over. Looking down, it wasn't menstrual blood, it looked like I'd been stabbed, and was bleeding uncontrollably, fire engine red stains seeping into the fabric all over. Nothing had leaked, but, as I ran to the fancy bathroom and plunged the robe into ice cold water, the basin turning pink and and then dullish red, I knew I'd never get the stain out and everyone would know what happened.

I woke up, heart still racing. Terrified someone would come in the bathroom and discover my accident.

And then I dreamed we adopted not one but two babies. From China. In my dream I don't remember giving much thought to the process, I tweeted the idea and then suddenly, had a photo of a very sweet baby to post online. But, turns out it wasn't one baby, it was two. Two adorable girls. Twins, which made them harder to adopt. I said sure thing and home they came with me, tightly swaddled, wrapped in blankets that only left their noses and eyes visible. We crashed in the hotel room and when i woke up the next morning—I don't know if I've ever slept in a dream before—I was home, but not this home, my NYC apartment, but the house I grew up in, in Massapequa, on Long Island. A quick dream note: many/most of my dreams take place in or around that house or on cruise ships. And almost all the dreams I remember are fraught with anxiety. Not being able to get somewhere fast enough or having forgotten something I desperately need. But back to my mom's kitchen . . . as I sat at the table, talking to my mother and explaining how I could easily handle two babies plus the rest of my life—another first, I don't remember previous dream chats—a very cute Chinese girl walked in. Probably 3 or 4, who spoke English relatively well. She explained that I wouldn't be able to pronounce her name, it sounded somewhat like Apple or April. But, she wanted to be called something entirely different in her new life. As we chatted, and I explained who I was, another girl bounded into the room. This one had banana yellow hair, teased into a beehive, and was wearing the brightest red lipstick.

I woke up, hearing my mother's voice, telling me (as she often does) that I'd taken on too much, that I wouldn't be able to handle it all, that I had to give myself a break.

Any thoughts or interpretations would be most welcome.

1 comment:

LPC said...

Whatever these mean, or represent, the colors seem to be most important. Colors, and a sense of complete "things that are not supposed to happen and are very dramatic and visible" are happening. The best dream advice I ever got was to relive the dream and try to inhabit it from the perspective of every person and every important object.