To Sleep, Perchance to Dream
While I think blogging about your dreams is one of the most narcissistic of past times, I had a dream a few weeks ago that just refuses to let go of me. In the hopes of “taming” it by talking about it, I’m going to share it with you. It’s also possible this is a ring-like dream, so if I share it with you, you’ll have it and then it will leave me alone. Won’t that be swell?
I was myself in this dream and I was more or less the same age I am now (although I was not pregnant), but it was some sort of sci-fi setting with lots of white. The initial setup of the dream has deteriorated, but it was a relatively simple concept: I was one of several people who volunteered to die so that everyone else could survive. Was it because supplies were short or because there wasn’t enough room in some escape pods? I have no idea. I’m sure the trailers for AMC’s “The Prisoner” had something to do with it, since Ian McKellan was the “head” of the group and was in charge of overseeing our deaths.
The pill’s lethality took the form of a sleeping aid. We would gently fall asleep and then never wake up again. Gentle, right?
Not so much. This was one of those dreams where certain things feel “real” beyond the scope of the dream. When the pill kicked in, it felt as real as if I’d popped a Benadryl or “PM” version of a pain killer in real life. In the dream, I started to panic. It wasn’t so much that I had changed my mind, but that I would either wake up in the afterlife, or just never wake up at all. I would know, or I would never, ever know. I wanted to share these last thoughts with my husband, but I was too far gone to speak.
In the dream, I fell asleep under a terror so palpable that my heart was racing when the dream ended and I woke up.
I’m still a bit terrified. I’ve had an exhausting weekend, and every time i start to sag when I need to be awake, I feel like I’m back in the dream. My imagination runs wild, and I start to wonder If I’m really dead, still stuck in the dream world, or if this time, when I fall asleep, it will be forever.
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