dreams

Aunt Dee can f*ck off

Life

So I have been writing down my dreams this past couple of weeks and it’s been both fun and enlightening, as well as helpful for my mental health. It’s been fun to interpret the meaning of them (it gives my brain something constructive to do) and it’s been very amusing to see how my brain uses metaphor for things in my waking life. It’s weird, actually. Things that seem just weird in my dream actually turn out to have some pretty solid meaning, and sometimes the meaning is very far from being obvious.

Well. Last night I had a visitation from Aunt Dee  in my dream.

I dreamed I was in a basement living room with my family and we were listening to music. It was really nice. In real life this is something that we have done all of my life, and when I was a kid it would sometimes turn into an impromptu dance party! I have very fond memories of these times. So I was listening to records with my family, having a nice time, when this bitchy woman walks in the door uninvited, walks across the room, and turns down the music. I couldn’t fucking believe how rude she was. I was speechless. My mom asked her, “Can I help you?” And she bitchily says she is turning down the music. And then my mom recognizes her as someone she is friendly with and they chat. All the while I am getting pissed off at this rude woman. At some point in my dream she yells at me and I try yelling back and I don’t have a voice. This is a common theme in my nightmares. I try to scream and nothing comes out. And it happened in last night’s dream as well. Eventually, after more stuff happens, she decides to leave. She walks up and picks up her bag and gives me a dirty look. I flip her off, tell her to fuck off, and tell her that she is a horrible human being. And when I say it there is no guilt because it is the truth.

When I woke up i almost didn’t write down the dream because I was thinking that it was just my brain being weird. But I wrote it down anyway, and then I let it sit in my subconscious. Eventually I realized that this bitchy woman in my dream was depression, or “Aunt Dee” as this blog post describes it (btw, really great advice in that link if you have to deal with depression).

This makes me happy because in my dream I tell off depression and tell it to fuck off, which makes me feel empowered. I feel like there is some semblance of control there, that I don’t have to let depression push me around.

And I woke up this morning deciding not to let it push me around. I have recognized it for what it is, and I am going to take care of myself and give my self a little bit of compassion. So there.

Suck it, Aunt Dee.

My sweet little Crackers – a dream.

Life

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I had a dream about my sweet childhood dog last night and I can’t stop thinking about her today. She was so precious to me. We got her when I was in Kindergarten and she lived well into my adulthood. I was around 24 when she died.

I remember this dream in such minute detail that I feel like I should write it down. I am pretty good about figuring out the symbolism of my own dreams but I can’t quite put my finger on what my dog symbolizes for me here.

It is night and I am a passenger in a mini-van with my dad, who is driving, and my younger brother who is in the section of seats behind me. I am laying across the middle seat. Crackers, our dog, is in the front seat (as far as I know, I am the same age in the dream as I am now). We are driving along a winding road and there is snow on the ground.

Every so often I call Crackers and she comes when I call her, hopping over the seat, wagging her tail and smiling, letting me give her a pet. She immediately goes to my brother and says, “hi” to him too. Then she jumps back in the front seat right away (she doesn’t hang around begging to be petted forever and ever, like most dogs do). When she jumped over the seat to say, “hi” to me it filled me with such joy and happiness. After awhile I kind of tested it. I would call her and she always, without question, jumped over the seat, and she was always very joyous and happy about it (as dogs are). She seemed to enjoy our little game.

We made a pitstop at Zips Drive-in (a popular hamburger joint in the Spokane area). My brother and Dad went in to get something to eat but I was reluctant about eating. I stayed behind. At this point the car was filled with dogs that we owned. When I opened the mini-van door I had to hold them back to prevent them from all rushing out. Crackers ran out, unfortunately. For some reason I wasn’t super worried about it. I was worried but not freaking out.

I walked up to the restaurant, deciding that I might eat and someone was talking about dogs and I turned around and saw that this someone was cradling  my sweet Crackers to their  chest. I said, “Hey, that’s my dog!” and he handed her to me. I held her to me and asked what happened. She was hurt and I became distraught with emotion over it. The guys said that she was hit by a car. She’d run into the street and someone found her laying there so he picked her up. He told me, “Be careful, I think she broke her ribs and hip.” I held her tightly to my chest. I felt so sad that she was hurt.

This part is significant because I really am recalling the feeling that I had in my dream when I held her. I could feel her fur and smell her distinct smell and all of this felt like home to me. I felt such a deep and profound feeling  of love when I held her. For some reason this feeling makes me tear up when I think about it. Even now, wide awake, I am feeling very emotional about it. So I am holding her tightly to my chest, feeling very maternal and very protective. I start heading back to the car and as we walk she is struggling in my arms. She is wiggling to become free because we are walking near the highway and she is afraid of the highway. I had to really hold on tight to her so she doesn’t wiggle free. As I do this I am trying to calm her down by telling her that I won’t let anything happen to her.

We walk and walk and I find myself lost and in an unfamiliar place. I’d taken the wrong route to the car.

I wake up.

Random

I had an odd dream last night. In my dream I realized that if I looked at a person long enough in their eyes they would shift into something else and the two of us would connect and recognize each other for what we really are. When we were in this altered state I could see that these people that I connected with were here for a purpose. They were working on something but I didn’t know what it was they were working on. Not everyone would shift when I looked into their eyes, only some people. I tested it out and stared into the eyes of strangers to see if they would shift – to the point of it being uncomfortable for the other person. The dream was about testing this theory about the “other”.

When I woke up and thought about it the dream reminded me a little of the John Carpenter film “They Live.”

Plinky Prompt: My last memorable Dream

Random

Plinky asks about my dreams. I had weird dreams on Saturday night. Very weird dreams, and lots of them. The one that really got to me was the one where the murdered girl appeared on my doorstep.

There was a young woman who went missing last week the city down the highway from me. The story made national news so you might already know about it. She left to go to work, a five minute drive from her home, at 6:45 am but didn’t make it. The police thought that her vehicle (which they found later) might have been in my town.

It turns out that it was in my town, at a local park. It was also at other places I have been to many times. On Friday evening they found her body at Larch Mountain, one of my favorite places to photograph.

In my dream there was an older man who had a  GPS device with him that could track her whereabouts. He told me she was alive and was on her way to my house. I started to panic  and tried to go upstairs to get my husband so I wouldn’t be so afraid but I didn’t have time, the older mad said, because she was at the door “right now.” I told the older man to stay with me because I was afraid to be alone with her. I opened the door and there she was, but she looked beautiful (not like a corpse, like a living being.) She didn’t say anything but I could sense that she was sad. I said, “I thought you were dead.” She didn’t respond. I went out the door, which lead to a garage. In the garage was a car, the one she was driving. In the passenger’s seat was a man, the man that kidnapped and murdered her. Only he was dead. She killed him. His arm was all carved up. Then I woke up.
What was it about? That is a good question. I think that this dream is the culmination of the unconscious, and conscious, anxiety for me that stems from this story. It is terrible and I am so heartbroken for her husband and parents. The fact that it was so close to home and that I have been to these places really got to me, in ways I probably don’t even understand. Being a woman, I am fearful of something like this happening to me (I think every woman is on some level). So that is what it was about. Anxiety. Pure anxiety. The world can be a scary place sometimes.

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Last night I had a dream that I was drowning

Life

I was alone on a dock on a lake. It was a sunny day and the sunshine warmed the skin on my bare arms and legs as I reached into the lake to grab something. I fell into the water and found myself on my back  struggling to stay afloat. I gasped for air as I looked above me. I saw the buildings on the docks, everything in full color, the sun still shining. Yet I was gasping for air. I woke up gasping and realized I was in my own bed. I was so incredibly relieved and grateful that it was just a dream and I wasn’t  drowning to death.

This morning I was listening to my “Starred” playlist on Spotify and the song “Rearrange Beds” by An Horse came on. It made me think of this:

“The pause makes you think the song will end. And then the song isn’t really over, so your relieved. But then the song really does actually end, because every song does actually end, obviously and THAT. TIME. THE. END. IS. FOR. REAL. “

– Jennifer Egan. A Visit from the Goon Squad, from the chapter, “Great rock and roll pauses.” (psst: please read this book. it is fucking brilliant.)

So yeah. What are you thinking about today?