Thursday, October 30, 2008

Working Through Dreams

For those of you who have been following along the past two months, you've read about me creating some goals, then breaking one of them by taking on too much, and then reigning things back in a little recently.

Part of my subconscious way of dealing with the day time madness is letting my dreams take over. The number of stress dreams I've been having has gone from a couple nights of a week to a nightly occurrence, with sometimes there being more than one stress dream in a night.

One recurring stress dream I have involves tornadoes. They tend to represent stress or craziness in my life. The tornadoes come close, sometimes pass over me, pass over the house I'm hiding in, even rattling the structure, but they've never hurt me. And I always see them coming. This has been a constant for years until a dream I had at the beginning of October. Here's a brief synopsis that I wrote in my journal the day after the dream:
As I walked back toward the building, I think I noticed the clouds had moved in and it started to rain.. then the wind started to blow, but as soon as I thought or someone said, "Here it comes!" the wind suddenly was VERY STRONG. Stronger than anything I had ever experienced. So strong that it ripped an aluminum can from my hand and seemed to crush it as it flew away. It seems that I turned my head to the left and sensed a white wall of wind, but then my body was picked up and I was thrown a little ways, landing on my back. Last part of the dream seemed to be me laying on my back and saying "Ow" as someone asked how everyone was.
This is the first time in a dream where I had an inkling of possible tornadic activity, but was in doubt that one would form. And then, coupled with that, it struck suddenly and struck me as well. I wasn't injured really, maybe bruised, but this was the first time my body had been physically picked up and tossed around by a tornado in a dream. Just over two weeks after that, I dropped out of the Warren Orchestra concert for November. A few days after I did that, I had another dream involving multiple tornadoes, but this time the shelter I had taken refuge in was picked up by the storm and gently set down somewhere else. There was a lot of destruction around, but me and the strangers who had hid with me were okay.

Last night, I dreamed I was canoing/kayaking on some river. I was with a group of women and we were enjoying meandering along on a nice, sunny day. At some point we hit rapids, but I wasn't too concerned. Then, we faced a small waterfall, but I instinctively knew how to handle it and came out of it just fine. Near the end of this dream, we came to the final, and largest, waterfall. It jutted out into the gorge below, but I figured if I had handled the last one, I could do this one too. When I hit bottom, I was tossed from the boat and felt myself being pulled back toward the falls by the current. Still, I kicked and swam free from the force to come to the surface and look back with a smile at the falls.

I don't doubt that I'm facing some chaos over the next month, but I think I'm going to make it through just fine. That's what I'm telling myself at least.

2 comments:

Elizabeth Gleason said...

Guess What!
I always have tornado dreams... As my client list gets heavier more tornados sneek in! You seem far more stretched then me. Last year I took a new stance. I work from 6am-5pm period! And I try to exercise now to get the stress out. WII boxing seems good lately and well a good martini always helps :)

battlemaiden said...

Paddle, girl, paddle!

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