Stranger Than Fiction
My dreams are… whew.
In the dream, I lose the ability to read. I don’t forget how to read; I can’t see letters anymore. They appear as gray spots or colored blurs. It starts with just one word, but then spreads to everything, including printed numbers.
That’s basically a nightmare for me, since I love reading.
In many dreams since COVID-19 started, I dream of being in crowds. At first, I’m excited! Look at all these people! I am at a concert, or a park, or even at a store. But then I realize that it’s too crowded, and people are too close to each other, and no one is wearing a mask.
That’s another nightmare.
Oh, and then there’s the terrible dream that takes place in the house I grew up in. In the dream, it is empty — my siblings and I are moving things out. (It’s not clear in the dream where my parents are.) In the last minutes (seconds?) of the dream, an old, terrible boyfriend of mine stages a home invasion. He and his conspirators are armed; my sister and I are not; my brother has already left.
This dream ends badly. I wake up and don’t go back to sleep.
I had a dream about my grandparents’ house, only it wasn’t really my grandparents’ house. It was based on the house I knew as their house, but it was a combination funhouse/china shop/antique store. Which is probably how I viewed my grandparents’ house when I was a child. Certain rooms and things were off limits, but more of it was full of magic — the attic with its costume jewelry, the basement with my grandfather’s work bench, the garage full of Marx Toys, the plum tree, the garden.
The house in the dream was an endless series of gaudy rooms — gilded antiques and rococo architecture. You could lose people in here. Which of course is how this dream goes: “Hey, we’ll meet up in such-and-such room” and then wandering, hearing my name being called, calling out to other people.
My dreams are more vivid, sometime lurid, and weirder than they ever used to be. And I have always had weird and vivid dreams. They are just weirder now, and more vivid.
For example (and this may be TMI for some of you), a version of an anxiety dream that I have often is that I have to go to the bathroom. My bladder is full to bursting, and I’m going to have an accident if I don’t find someplace to release it. I go from marked restroom to marked restroom (I am always someplace public in these dreams, a restaurant or dormitory), but every toilet is … not just inoperable, but already overflowing and disgusting.
Lately — and I mean in the past two months or so — the urge isn’t urination, but defecation. Which, when toilets are full, is worse.
To say I find these dreams unsettling would be an understatement. They are awful. Disgusting, mortifying (again, always in public), just gross.
But they keep coming.
And the characters in the dreams! Long-lost childhood acquaintances, ex-boyfriend after ex-boyfriend, people from social media (some of whom I’ve met, some of whom I haven’t), and — a personal favorite — the senior management gent who in one particular dream was sporting purple nail polish.
I have no doubt that, in general, these dreams are not portents of anything to come. They are simply my anxiety processing — however oddly — through my subconscious.
Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash
