In Twilight Regalia

It’s the season to be bleary.  When one of my attorneys suggested using Ambien to sleep the other day, I was pretty horrified.  How far out of normalcy are we all that drugs to sleep and wake and endure regular stresses of life are constantly dumped in our body?  And stranger still to have her suggest it to me like it was oh…. breakfast cereal. But I do have to do something: Right now I have some kind of wierd super-chapping going on on my lips that won’t get better after five days of emollients, chapstick and what all else I could come up with.  Is that from snoring? Is that snoring also making my dreams so wacked out that I wake up exhausted and my short-term memory is shot?   I know it’s doing weird things to my mouth perhaps, this unsettled sleep.  

When I’m dreaming I’m almost always younger, thinner, and surrounded by people - sometimes friends, sometimes not, but it’s incredibly active and fully colorful, even swamped in emotional atmosphere.  Why this is, given that I have an almost solitary life in many ways, is beyond me.  But it’s getting crowded in there.  Last night I was dreaming there were people looking for me in a town I was unfamiliar with and I was running into everyone I knew (and don’t know in real life at all). It was almost chaotically involved. 

Over the years I’ve noticed several things happen that are geared into the physical aspects of sleep for me.  1) when congested, I have very frightening dreams about being strangled; 2) when stressed or troubled, I wake up exhausted to realize I’ve been working all night at pretty much the same thing I do all day; 3) When I find myself dreaming of animals, particularly if the animals are getting hurt or in danger, I am generally experiencing serious stress in my own regular life; and 4) If I’m wandering from dream sequence to dream sequence looking in desperation for a working and empty bathroom in a place where they’ve all been taken or are out of commission, it’s definitely me poking myself to wake up and GO.  

But things rarely carry over in feeling to the rest of my day. Lately, it has.

The stage in the last dream was my work, and I was supposed to work for (we’ll call him Arthur), and I was experiencing panic over the fact that I couldn’t remember were Arthur and his family lived, which was a problem since I had just moved in with them, to help their family (as a cleaner? au pair?).  I was in a taxi crammed full of unknown miscellaneous people, wishing there were a yellow pages phonebook so that I could at least look up the “Sacred Heart (something or other)” which I new was near the house, because I literally had forgotten all traces of my new address.  Couldn’t conjure it from memory at all; didn’t know the area of town even…and on we drove, me and the mad hatter commuters, with no idea where anyone was going….

…and OH YEAH, the time frame: It was 1940s and the Japanese?  or the future and the Chinese? — someone was invading.  Anyway it was a dark desolate period of time and we were overrun with faceless Asian invaders in uniform and I was moving from an old location to a new one in a strange new town with damaged old buildings and I was living with Arthur and his family (if I could ever find it as the taxi made yet another zig zag and someone’s handbag ended up in my lap).  Why was I living with Arthur?  Was Arthur a doctor??  I can’t recall…

 

….but I recall the part where he made a PASS at me, once I had made it there and no one was in the room, and mid-kiss I begged him to stop for the sake of his wife, or then, for his daughter.  My father left!, I said, don’t put her through this!  He straightened and left the room only to return a few minutes later with a smallish,  loud, revving chain saw in hand.  He looked at me so strangely calm, right in the eyes, and I was terrified.  He didn’t look like he was going to kill me, but it was psychotic.  He set it on the table, still running, and left the room. 

And that was when my life of running through the occupied areas began, darting in and out of basement passageways and dodging behind doorways, finding others who were hiding in the same doorway, wishing to god I’d taken my cell phone, where was it?, trying to hit an old man over the head with a pulled-out wooden drawer so I wouldn’t be discovered, sneaking into a lounge of “allowed” expatriots, feeling safe for only a few minutes, and then some woman came around poking us, looking for keys around our necks which were to our allotted homes, showing we were allowed, belonged.  And I didn’t have one.  Ah the excuses I made.  So many, and strangely so bumbling was I sounding that they believed me and in a miracle of sheer naivite it worked.  Then it was just a matter of explaining to the others that I couldn’t go home, and what the hell was I supposed to do now? I had a guy with a chainsaw at home.

Back in reality the next morning, the elevator opens and it’s the REAL ARTHUR, and I get a half-romantic chainsaw moment as he smiles good morning to me. 

YIKES. 

I AM UNABLE TO SPEAK A GOODMORNING.

I really really need some NON-REM sleep.  Really.