A lot of people are having anxiety right now. I guess I’m lucky in that I got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder at age 10 and have remained pretty well managed since then thanks to a very effective medicine that rhymes with sex-a-bro. While my anxiety thankfully is no longer much of an issue in my conscious life, it manifests itself in my subconscious. I have hard-core recurring dreams, which I thought everyone did until a conversation with friends. So about two-thirds of my dreams are one of the below:
Get out
If you’ve ever seen the movie “Far and Away,” (and you should - I have it on VHS if you want to borrow it) there’s a scene where Nicole Kidman’s and Tom Cruise’s characters have snuck into a rich family’s house to get out of the cold and get something to eat. The family is about to return home. I always have this dream where I’m in some building I shouldn’t be and I need to get out because the rightful owner is coming. In my real life, I have never engaged in burglary. I am a rule-following machine who has never even once cracked an “employee-only” door to see what’s behind it. But in my dream life, I’m somehow a breaking and entering machine: mansions, computer server rooms and private gardens in which I have gotten tangled in a hammock trying to escape. I never take anything. I’m just there hanging out until the freak-out moment of a door opening somewhere. I usually awake from these dreams very sweaty. (Who am I kidding? I wake from pretty much all sleep very sweaty.)
Forgot the routine
At least every other week, I ruin the dance recital. My ballet instructor is like, “Where have you been?! Get out there now!” I stumble onto the stage with my fellow dancers and strain my brain trying to remember the moves I learned in high school. They’re all turning one way, and I’m going the other. I also dream-forget my tights or leotard a lot and have to dance in my bra. A variation on this one is the marching band show. Although not as frequent as forgetting my dance routine, this dream features me forgetting our halftime show with the added danger of getting whacked by a flag twirler or trampled by a bass drum.
Sexy times with unsexy people
Not really anxious while I’m asleep, but about twice a year, I have a sexy dream about different guys at work to whom I have absolutely zero attraction in my waking hours. It’s anxiety-inducing the when I seem them the next day and feel super awkward. I feel like they know, and I want to clarify with them that I don’t feel that way about them and am happily married. Like it was just a drunk, one-night dream stand, and can we please move on? There’s zero chemistry here, and I know we’ve seen each other dream naked, but this is a place of business, so let’s act like this never happened. Which it didn’t. (And why can’t I have sexy dreams about hot dudes?! You’re really letting me down, limbic system.)
Credit hours
Someone discovers that I did not actually have enough credit hours to graduate from college, so I have to go back. This is a regular occurrence in my REM, but it somehow blends with my real-life concerns. I have to move back to my college town three hours away, but how will I balance that with my job and my kids? There are no apartments available so I have to live with my horrible freshman-year roommate again and walk in on her giving blowjobs to football players. And dream campus features 40 new buildings that have popped up since I graduated, so I don’t know where anything is or even what classes I’m enrolled in. Because I don’t know what classes I’m enrolled in, I miss a bunch of them and have piles of work to do and a tanking GPA, which I cannot handle because I’m an over-achiever who graduated magna cum laude IRL.
Nowhere to go
I’m in a public place and have to pee. Unfortunately, the only toilet available is in the middle of everything. Like in the magazine rack at Target or in the middle of the stadium concourse at a football game. Or there are no stalls. You just have to pee in front of God and everyone else inside a huge, open restroom, to include dudes. Sometimes this dream gets a little too real and I have to wake up and make a beeline for the bathroom.
Bye-bye teeth
Apparently, teeth-falling-out dreams are fairly common. They certainly are with me. As I drift into slumber, my teeth start cracking and falling out. I push one with my tongue and out it pops. I basically have meth mouth every few weeks as I doze, but just the mouth - not the scratched up face, paranoia or next-level horniness that are the other common meth side effects. The frequency of these dreams intensified when my 6-year-old son lost four teeth within a month. Every time I wake up from one of those dreams, I run my tongue around my beautiful, complete set of teeth and praise Jesus for my chompers.
Last week I had a dream about playing with kittens. It was a nice break from F-ing up the halftime show, not finding my class and pissing in the middle of the aisle in the grocery store.
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