dreams

I am a cop, sitting on a bed -thin mattress, no boxspring - watching the sky through a barred window, waiting for my partner to check in.

The sky goes lightning-fast from dusk to dark to dawn.  Time has tesseracted.

We are separated, and I can't find my way back.

I howl out a protest..

"Dusti?  Are you with me?"

Bones is holding my hand in the dark.  I've cried out in my sleep again.

My speech is slurred, but I stammer out a description of what was going on, why I screamed.  I apologize.

"You're not alone, my Squirrel."

He drifts off to sleep as I murmur another apology.

The dreams only fit a few of the descriptors of night terrors, so I'm not sure entirely what to call them...other than embarrassing. Frustrating.  Upsetting.  Sometimes, terrifying.  I can usually remember the part that made me scream, and I can usually figure out what my sleeping brain is struggling with, but that's not as reassuring as one might think.

While I can trace my anxiety back to childhood, I didn't have nightmares of this magnitude until I started having panic attacks in my early 20's.  Nightmares?  Yes, I had them, but not many, and they were generally repetitive:  someone is chasing me, meaning me harm, and I am hiding/running/trying to get away.  Those dreams stopped once I moved out of my father's home.

The screaming dreams have varied themes.  Ironically, I thought I'd conquered one of the themes this past weekend.  There is a recurring dream of me having to go into a house, usually to live there, and Something Bad is already there - a ghost, an animosity - and I am struggling to find a way to deal with it.  Usually, I lose, and I wake up screaming.  But a few nights ago, I worked my way through the entire dream, and woke up feeling relieved, even accomplished.

Last night's dream touched on one of the more common themes:

• I am alone.


• No one will hear me.


• No one can help me.

That is the dream that started them all...the dream that inspired a strangled scream so horrible that it hurt my throat and terrified my mother, who thought someone was literally trying to kill me.

I think about the teenager I used to be, asking my psychology teacher to explain nightmares because nothing he had described in class connected at all to my dreamscape.  And I think that's what I find most frustrating about nights like last night.  Once Upon a Time, I didn't do this.

I want that to be my reality again.