Awake with Cheesecake

I’m in that 3AM fugue state, but oh my God, what a beautiful, beautiful night. I studied texts that gave me new insights into events that shaped my mother’s life and my own. I wept at a stunning 13th century poem by a deeply religious trans woman struggling with a God that put her in a body she does not identify with, with an absolute mic drop of an ending. I learned about the work of hospital chaplaincy both in itself and in terms of serving people of other faiths. I laughed and sighed and cheered through a lovely slam session. I considered existential questions through the lens of Camus and Homer Simpson. I made art. I gorged myself on ice cream and potato chips. I caught up with my brother and friends, including fantastic classmates, coworkers, a trapeze artist/rabbinical student I met just last week, and the Hillel director who took me to my first rock concert at age thirteen. Then I walked home through the surprisingly bustling streets of Boston at oh-God-thirty. This is why I love Shavuot.

ETA: The perfect end to the night: I dreamed that it was still three in the morning on Shavuot, but that that meant I’d been staying up all night tabletop gaming, because I worked at a games store, and we decided, you know who would be great at this? Pat Rothfuss. And we totally have his number in the office. Doesn’t matter that it’s 3 AM, he keeps weird hours and he’d love to be included. (My dream brain apparently also doesn’t care how far Wisconsin is, ’cause he totes lives in the same town in this scenario.)

So I got to be the one to call him, and he had a blast and made playing the game even better for us. Now that’s what I call the heavens opening at midnight.

Wasted effort

Last night I went to a new critique group/pot luck for the first time. It was grueling. And afterwards, I’m sitting in the smoldering wreckage with one of the other group members as she gently tries to convince me that I need to explain my terms earlier in the text so the audience has an emotional context for the heroine’s big reveal, and I’m kicking myself for not realizing that was needed on my own.

And then I open my eyes and realize, “Oh. I’m dreaming. I’m dreaming a critique session that never happened, about a novel I never wrote.” Which is a shame, because Lyta Alexander brought some tasty-looking chocolate truffles and pretzel rolls I would have loved to try before the assassins struck and blew up the place.

Nightmares

Just had one of my childhood chronic nightmares for the first time in years, and for the first time it was actually scary and painful during the dream, not just afterwards. My dad and I were covered in hornets, being stung repeatedly. Not fun, especially because wasps do get into the attic sometimes, so I was afraid when I woke up that they might be real and didn’t dare move.

Normally, the dream has followed the same pattern since I was three or four years old: I’m at some kind of family gathering and everyone is covered in insects (spiders, cockroaches, ants the size of Shetland ponies), but we’re all calm and proceed normally. It’s usually only after I wake up that I’m scared and creeped out, wondering whether the tickles on my arms and legs are normal tickles or real creepy crawlies. I don’t know what it means that this time was upsetting even before I woke up.

Mind playing tricks

I had a strange, vivid dream last night that I’m not going to bore you with, but one small tangent of the dream was that (while running through a hotel trying to find the con artists who just ran a speed-dating seminar), I checked back in with a webcomic that I used to love, Valentine-like Hearts, and discovered that they were doing REALLY well, and actually had a movie coming out! Very exciting.

So I wake up, eager to check back in with this webcomic and see if they really do have a movie coming out, or at least catch up on what they’ve been doing in the past couple of years, only to do a google search and discover that there is no such comic. At all.

Now, this is kind of weirding me out, because I KNOW that this comic exists. I know that I spent something like two days going through their backlist a few years back. But the more I think about it, trying to remember those two days, the more I realize that this webcomic is actually a VHS anime that was in someone else’s basement IN ANOTHER DREAM a few years back, where I was trying to rescue Uri from an evil campus with cobblestones streets and way too many rhododendrons.

This kind of thing actually happens to me every couple of years, where some aspect of a dream is consistent with a previous dream and because I have previous memories of the situation, the dream feels more authentic. It becomes hard to check my memories and remind myself that, for instance, the Cthulu-esque nightmare I just woke up from isn’t real.

Am I alone in this? Or do other people have these kinds of serialized dreams, too?

Owie

Had a nightmare and managed to sprain my wrist. Ow.

Dreams

Do any of you have recurring dreams or nightmares? There are two in particular that I’ve had since long before I was old enough to write them down that have come back over and over through the years. One is scary but always clear in its meaning and significance. That’s not the one I had last night. I had the one about some sort of family reunion where insects start crawling all over everything. It’s never scary, just gross and overwhelmingly real, and I always wake up thinking every tickle on my body must be an insect, so I turn on all the lights and get no more sleep. Much as I wish for the more-interesting-than-gross cow-sized ants of my childhood nightmares, last night I got a double treat of cockroaches and spiders breeding in my childhood room, forcing me to throw out all my stuff in a desperate attempt to get rid of the damned things.

The problem is, while the other dream is always very clear, this one’s always ambiguous. It always has the elements of an important family gathering and an infestation of insects, and is never scary, only gross, but beyond that, the dream and the triggers change so much that I’m never sure if it’s a subconscious warning, a sign I’m welcoming someone into the family, warts and all, or just my back-brain kicking up random stuff.