Vivid Dreams or Nightmares
They just seem so real!
I dream the most incredibly realistic dreams. I don’t always remember them but those that I do remain etched in mind because of how close they seemed to reality.
My dreams have such detail and realism that they still seem real after I wake up. Like a memory rather than a dream. I can see detail on a piece of toilet paper and pebbles on the ground. I have had dreams about being on a beach. In the dream, I could feel the scratchiness and warmth of the sand and smelled the salt in the air as the waves crashed. In dreams about parties, I could hear the music and taste whatever I was drinking.
It has been like that for most of my life and for the most part it is pretty darn cool!
One of the less fun ones was from when I was a child. I often dreamt that I woke up, got dressed, had breakfast, and walked to school. I could feel my clothes, taste the orange juice, smell the toothpaste, and even recognize the houses I walked by. Then some detail would strike me as weird, and boom! I would wake up only to realize that I was late for “real” school.
Dreams about running, aliens, flowers, chaotic catered events, dancing and so many more. Unfortunately, I never took the time to discover what real-life event might be the source of any given dream. And, for better or worse, my dreams never repeated. Until I had one of the scariest dreams that I could remember ever having.
Lights out?
The dream in question didn’t just happen once. Unfortunately, it happened nightly for about 3 weeks following the birth of our son. It so disturbed me that I began to wish for insomnia. However, I was too sleep-deprived for that.
In the dream, I was standing alone while my husband, daughter, and newborn son, all dressed in white, stood in the snow just out of my reach. I could see the flakes of snow, the detail in the lace on their clothes, and I could feel the cold and hear the crunch of the snow under their bare feet. They were as clear to me as the computer I am writing this on.
My husband cradled our son in his right arm and had his left arm around the shoulder of our daughter. They were smiling and peaceful but I was soundlessly crying because I somehow knew that they were dead and that they could not stay. As they turned to leave I would wake up…crying!
For weeks this went on. I was afraid to sleep but I had to. Subsequently, I began to fear waking up thus making me remember the dream. So I asked a friend about it and thank goodness I did. She told to me that it was common to have death dreams after a birth. I just needed to remind myself that just because I dreamt it didn’t mean that it was going to come true. Seemed so simple and obvious. And just like that, it was over! No more “nightmare” about losing my family. They just stopped.
However, the feelings I had during the dream stayed with me for a long while.
So why write about this now?
As I often write, these posts are mostly digital diaries for my kids and people who might find them of some interest.. Though I am aware that the first group might not be part of the second, I continue because I am finding the writing cathartic and fun. A way to get stuff off of my chest and look back at my life a bit. If an idea comes to me while I am walking I will make a point of jotting it down in the draft section of my blog. Hopefully, when I get back to it I will remember what I wanted to write about.
To that end, I began this post a few weeks ago with a brief, incomplete sentence: dream about Havre disaster. Today while trying to recall that dream, I instead found myself remembering the one I described above. I hadn’t thought about that one in many years but I remembered the fear that it created and the sense of discomfort I felt even after the dreams stopped. However, as I wrote about it today I was relieved to discover that it no longer had the same power over me.
Since that time our family has lived through heart surgery, iffy Chinese food, road trips, a new teenage driver, a car accident, icy winter roads, bad drivers, house floods, mold issues, Covid19, and so much more. And we are still here…and with one more than in the dream. I always carry around a little bit of worry for the “what if” but I rarely have bad dreams. Happily, there are lots of vivid good ones.
As for the Havre disaster…the real building is doing better than it was in the dream so I think we’re good.
