Dan is forever being entertained by the weird things I tell him about from my adventures as an active sleeper when we wake up in the morning. As my old college roomate, Robin, can attest, I do a lot of talking, gesturing, sitting up, and occasionally, walking around when I am asleep. But I never get to see that stuff, because I�m unconscious, and dreaming. I have always been a pretty vivid dreamer, but lately my dreams have gotten just plain weird. It�s worse when I am stressed out, and, lately, the stress is mounting by the second, so the dreams are getting more interesting. So here, for your entertainment, are the two latest dreams my anxiety-riddled mind has conjured up:
Dream One: I am at a graduation for Belhaven College, my alma mater. I�m not graduating, so apparently I�m there to see someone else graduate, but tons of people from my graduating class are there, too, including people I haven�t seen since the day we graduated. For some reason, we�re all wearing graduation robes, and my hair is really, really messy. And we�re all talking and they�re telling me things that have happened in their lives since 2001 that actually sound kind of plausible. (It�s weird to me that my brain takes the trouble to make up realistic-sounding things for people I haven�t seen in three years to be doing with their lives. Meanwhile, I can�t ever find my keys.) We�re all sitting on these risers that are almost completely vertical, straight up into the ceiling, and you have to lean back so you don�t fall off the front. I�m talking to one of the �01 grads, and then I lean forward too much and I fall and wake up. End of dream.
Dream Two: For some reason, my wedding rings start disentegrating. The platinum is actually falling apart into little flakes, and the diamond is crumbling, and I�m trying to gather up the pieces so I can take them to the jeweler and he can melt them all back together. (How would he do this? I have no idea. But I know what the guy who sat behind me in Biology at Belhaven is doing!) For some reason, in my dream, I am laughing about this, but I�m still really freaked out. When I wake up, I am genuinely surprised to see my rings, intact, on my finger. I am so relieved that I wake Dan up to tell him about it. He is also vastly relieved to learn, at 4:30 a.m., that my rings have not dissapeared into thin air.
If dreams really are the brain�s way of sorting through the puzzles of your life, I have big issues.