Friday, June 11, 2021

Anxiety Dreams

 It's not uncommon for me to find myself awake at 4 AM.  Usually, I blame the cats or the dog or having to go to the bathroom for my "what time is it" awakenings, but today it was an unpleasant dream.  I seem to be having more anxiety dreams lately, where I'm back in old places or with old bosses, but this is the first one where goons tied me up and tortured me to death (they wanted to know where Mark was, and I didn't know).  Luckily (?) I must have been aware enough in the dream that before things got too bad, the dream shifted and I was (possibly) Jamie Sommers (the Bionic Woman) ... but this time the enemy agents had kidnapped my six-year-old daughter and were using her to insure my good behavior for some kind of mind-control experiment.  

Huh.  It's just come to me that prior to all of this, in an earlier dream, I was walking alone on a beach (somehow this was connected to shaving), a little ways away from a group of professors (an amalgam of folks I've known from work at the university).  They were discussing how they had made recent story sales, and what writing projects they were working on, and how the markets were picking up again.  They started out behind me, and as we picked our way over tufts of beach grass and driftwood,  I wanted to join up with them, but they kept walking a little to my left and then they were ahead of me.  I felt left out and jealous of their camaraderie and trudged after them.  Eventually, we all climbed a dune or cliff and re-entered a house.  Everyone trouped through a sliding glass door, through my living area, and then out through another door (I have the sense I was living in an apartment complex or dorm).  I stayed behind and surveyed the living room, which had an undergraduate student decor.  

I fairly sure the second dream is the continuation of a short exchange Mark and I had as I was submitting a short story to a market that I've yet to break into.  


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