Dreaming

I am not sleeping well.  It's one of those things that you realize is happening but you brush it off as a random occurrence.  It's just a late night or a glass of wine too many before bed or a stressful day.  And then before you know it, you look back and the number of bad nights stretches behind you in a line too long to ignore.  I might as well admit it now - I'm not sleeping well.

I am dreaming and it frightens and irritates me in equal measure.  I don't have good dreams or if I do, I don't remember them.  If I'm dreaming and I remember it, then I'm having nightmares.  It's always been like that.  I can't relate to people who tell me about their good dreams.  I don't know what that feels like.

So, I've been dreaming...  J remarked on it a few times, saying that I was restless and twitchy in my sleep.  Perhaps I am, but I don't know how I behave physically, I just know that I wake up wishing I never had to close my eyes again.  Sleep has always been a welcome escape for me and it's rapidly losing its appeal.

My dreams are particularly disturbing to me because they defy logic.  Not waking logic, I don't expect quite that much, but they defy even logic one might expect from dreams.  In my nightmares two things are happening in parallel - there are the actions and then there are the emotions of the dream.  The break in logic is this: the actions do not match the emotions, at all.  I could be dreaming about utterly mundane things, making dinner or shopping for groceries, but the emotions that come along are wildly out of context and scale.

In my dreams all the strong emotions that I suppress, often without knowing I'm doing it, during the day, come out to play and they are merciless.  They infuse my dreams and take over, heedless of the actual content of the dream; leaving me shaken and confused.  I woke up crying the night before last, the sound of my own moans and the wetness of tears is what woke me up.  I opened my eyes and while on some level I realized that I had been dreaming, the grief I felt was so profound and so real, I couldn't seem to loosen its grip.

It's not always sadness that invades my dreams, although that seems to be the most prevalent emotion.  Sometimes it's fear or crippling anxiety, but more often than not, it's sadness.  Usually sadness associated with loss or abandonment.  I don't understand it.  I have no fear of abandonment in my waking hours and I've coped with loss before, although I might as well admit that my way of coping with loss is to shove it as far down the pit of my psyche as possible and pretend it's not there.

Still, that's neither here nor there...  I'm dreaming and I want it to stop.  I need a fix and I need it soon, preferably before I close my eyes tonight.