Nightmare

Less than ten minutes ago, I woke up screaming from a nightmare. That is a very, very rare thing in my world, thank goodness. I woke up so abruptly that I'm still having that feeling like my brain is getting tiny shocks every time I move my eyeballs. Very weird. And, even though I've been somewhat chilled all day, now I'm hot, and can't seem to cool down.

Gladly, nightmares have naever been a frequent occurrence for me. I suspect the majority of them I never wake up from or even remember. But the funny thing is, in spite of my lack of practice, it appears I'm getting a lot better at nightmare screaming. Until the last few years, if I tried to scream in a nightmare, I'd let out this pathetic little mewling that probably couldn't even be heard from the next room, if someone was there. This latest one, while not really a full-throated scream, was pretty loud -- the loudest one I ever had, I think -- and once I was awake, I lay there for a bit wondering if my neighbours had heard it. Would they call 911 because of the lady screaming? Probably the only thing that saved me was the fact that it came from my bedroom, and was fairly short-lived. And no...I don't have someone spending the night.

That nightmare was actually the last (blessedly) in a string of nightmares I'd been having since falling asleep tonight. All of them centred around intruders into my room, which, in the dreams, was a dorm room back at college...albeit much larger than the one I really had. To make matters worse, the room had not one, but two doors, one at each end. The dreams had all been about men coming through those doors, which I'd inexplicably left unlocked, or came unlocked because of shoddy workmanship on the doorframes. At one part of the dream, I was even visited by a security guard coming by to warn me to lock up tight, but didn't tell me why, leaving me to wonder. Which is probably why I had that last dream.

In that last dream, safely (I thought) tucked away with all the doors and windows locked and curtains closed, I'd gone to sleep. The intruder came in...get this...through a ceiling tile, dangling by his feet over my bed. The last image I was fighting off as I struggled to wake up was this crazy-man dangling above me, upside down. He had an evil grin on his face, and was dressed kind of like The Joker from Batman, right down to the black and white leather shoes and purple zoot suit (or was that the dude from The Mask?). He just hung there, grinning at me while I screamed bloody murder, and then he gave me this little shrug and tilt of his head as if to say, see? I'll get in no matter what you do.

Fuuuuck.

It's been a long time since I dreamed about something like that. For the first few years after I moved into my first apartment, I used to be so nervous alone at night all the time. I even took a carving knife to bed with me once or twice. One time, I even piled a bunch of empty pop cans in front of the entrance door so it would make a lot of noise and wake me if anyone tried to come through the door. And that wasn't even because of nightmares. Just plain fear and nervousness. I didn't really get over that night-fear till sometime after my marriage ended. The first house I lived in after that was a big old two-storey place that creeped me out, being there all alone, but ever since that place, for some reason, I don't have that fear anymore.

Well, I have the fear, sure. Any woman living alone probably does. But I don't obsess about it like I used to. Thank goodness.

There's two possible reasons why this dream happened tonight. Maybe three. First, and least likely, I went to bed super early tonight...like around 8:30. I was just bored, mostly, and didn't feel like staying up. I read for a while and then turned out the light. It took me a long time to drop off, so I couldn't have been asleep more than forty five minutes when the dream struck.

The next possible reason was that, when I came home last night from my writing session in Stittsville, the door seemed to give a wee bit too soon when I unlocked it...as if it had already been unlocked. That brought back all the old fears about someone lurking in my apartment, waiting to leap out at me at any moment. I turned on all the lights right away and went around checking the place out. No one here, of course, and I had just imagined that the door hadn't been locked when I came in.

The last, and probably most likely reason is that it was an anxiety dream. My mother's in the hospital because of a bad infection in her leg from a surgery that was done on it over a month ago. I visited her there with my step-dad for ninety minutes or so this afternoon. She seemed pretty good, in spite of her situation. Very tired though...I think she was happy when the guy showed up to install her phone and TV and cleared Jack and me out of her room. No matter how good the likely outcome, it's never any fun seeing your mother in a hospital bed.

The deepest, most primal fear of my life is losing my mother. The second worst is being intruded on by a stranger with ill-intent in my home.

I guess all I can say is that I'm glad I didn't have a nightmare about losing Mum. If I had, it would have been a hell of a lot longer, if ever, before I'd have been able to sit down and write about it.

(P.S. congratulations are in order...this appears to be my 300th blog post on Live to Lounge. Too bad the subject matter wasn't happier!)