StarShaper7 wrote:Dreamed that I was murdered by a spree shooter.
I've had one of those. It was one where I'm in a school cafeteria modeled after the one I remember from high school, with the Obamas eating in the same cafeteria because politics and photo-ops. An announcement alerts us to an intruder in the building. My instinct is to be away from the Obamas because they're probably the main targets, so I try to just be as much one of the crowd as possible to maximize my odds of not being noticed, but sure enough, after I get down to the floor on my knees with my face to the floor, I get shot through the left temple (without ever seeing the shooter) and think to myself, yep, this is it, I'm either dead or my life is never going to be the same -- huh, come I'm even still able to think? I don't even seem to be mentally damaged, I can still think just fi-- and then I realized it wasn't real and that I was waking up.
I believe that's only the second time in my life I've had a dream where I enter a state where I'm sure I'm going to die and a whole rush of feelings pass through me in a blink.
...
Speaking of bad dreams, I had this one today when I woke up that really takes the cake as far as my recent history is concerned. In it, my mom returns from her extended stay of treatment (she's off at a residential treatment center right now, working through childhood issues over a 90-day period), and as soon as she returns she's already drunk. I can tell she's drunk but can't say anything about it until I catch her red-handed trying to conceal alcohol or alcohol consumption (the details are wacky and hard to remember let alone describe) and point it out to everyone around (my family). And so we start talking about what our next steps should be, and I suggest that because the religious 12-step approach clearly failed, we should try the secular SMART program.
It was actually kind of weird to wake up from that and gradually realize that Mom was not back yet and is still being treated off at that place that has me really worried about what kind and quality of treatment she's actually getting.
Also throughout the dream there was still that bizarre sense of how manufactured of a problem it really was. There was a part, I don't remember its place in the sequence (before or after I catch her red-handed), where I see her dancing drunkenly to music (with lights and everything) with a drink in her hand (something I've never actually seen and which, from her habits that have been revealed, I know to have likely never happened) and I stop myself from saying anything or trying to point it out because it's not my place to control her life and my reaction is a lot more about me and about me reacting to societal expectations for how I should feel about the situation, and to the reaction of the rest of my family whose emotional state often controls my own.
My dreams are hardly ever mysterious to me -- and this is yet another one of those where it's pretty clear to me what my psyche is working out. But God do I hate it. Why can't sleep be an escape from my long-standing neuroses instead of a magnification of them?