I Hate My Dreams.

Like about half of the American population, I went and saw Inception over the summer. I really liked it. When we were leaving the theater, I started going on and on to my friends about how I thought Nolan really captured what it's like to dream lucidly, and how it is to make yourself die in a dream just so you can get out of it. 

And they kind of looked at me like I was a little crazy and said things like: "What the...?" Because apparently, most people haven't committed suicide in their nightmares so they could get out of them. That's the stuff movies are made of.

I think the first time I had a dream like that was when I was about six or seven years old. In the dream, my mom had taken my little brother to be on some clown-game-show, like Bozo, and left her daughters at home in the house, which had somehow inexplicably acquired a large, ravenous alligator in her absence. For some reason, going out the front or back doors or windows wasn't an option. So most of the dream was about my sisters and I trying to escape, while looking at the TV every now and then to shout at the screen for our mom to come home and save us. 

Then I realized: "Oh. If we just let the alligator eat us, I'll wake up, and this super-scary and stressful situation will be over!" So I ran over to where it was waiting on the stairs and flung myself down. And I woke up. 

More recently, I've been disturbed by how my dreams don't seem to mesh with the current situation I'm in as far as life goes. For instance, last night I had a dream that Jeff and I had to give up our cats and Bella (who, if you haven't been keeping up with this blog, has been dead for almost 2 months), which probably has something to do with the fact that we had to give up a dog we had recently adopted. 

I've also had dreams about teaching. And they aren't these super happy dreams, either. They're just filled with this tense feeling, like I'm totally unprepared, and the students are asking these impossible questions, and they don't understand a word I'm telling them. 

Once I woke up screaming from a dream, because the cats were having a hissing-and-spitting-and-screaming fight out in the hallway. I almost gave my husband a heart-attack. I was just screaming and pointing a finger at the bedroom door, completely freaking out. And I'm sorry to say, while that is the most dramatic instance of me waking from a dream, it isn't the only one.

I can't remember the last time I had just a nice, happy dream. 

I mean, is that too much to ask of my subconscious? 

But that's the thing. These nightmares and miserable dreams come from something going on in the back of my mind, keeping me from just letting go of things, or enjoying life, even when I'm completely unconscious. And that totally sucks. 

And it totally throws off the rest of my day. Instead of waking up, feeling like it's a fresh and new day, ready to start, it's like my day's already been off to a bad start. Something is off, and I want a do-over. It's too bad I'm not the kind of person who listens to herself: no matter how much I tell myself it was just a dream, it still affects me.

But what do you do about it, anyway? Meditate? Take lots of Tylenol PM? Drink? Pray? I'm already an intense person, even when I am awake, and I find that most of my conscious efforts to relax, breathe deeply, stop obsessing or thinking about things too much, do pretty much shit-all as far as getting me to be a more zen kind of person. So forget about it when I'm sleeping.

Did I mention I also grind my teeth in my sleep?

Freud is kind of full of it a lot of the time, but maybe some of his theories are right: having subconscious thoughts/desires/issues kind of sucks. (I'm almost positive Freud said that, too). And it wreaks havoc on your sleeping life.

Let's just get rid of it. And yes, by "it" I mean our subconscious. Other creatures seem so happy without it, and just have dreams about chasing things. I'd love a dream where I'm just chasing something.