Nightmare Time

I remembered I wanted to keep some kind of track of them here in order to analyze over all themes and things. 

This one has many of our usual offenders: my ex, being trapped, crying while helpless to do anything, Portland, being lost/late.   Also some new players in the form of generic thugs from a 90s arcade game and my dream actively fighting me when I realize it is a dream and am screaming to get out.  Wheee.  

I was moving.  I had everything I owned all packed up to move somewhere and got on a plane.  

I woke up [in the dream] in a flat empty lot, slab of concrete with huge cracks, grass growing up through it, and these three or four huge muscle guys standing over me.  They gestured to this pit next to them which had random luggage in it. 

“You can take one for 5 dollars,” they told me. 

So I try to rummage through the pit, looking for my very distinctive neon green bags.  

“What are you being so picky for?” they asked me. 

“I’m just looking for mine, then I’ll be out of your way.”  

And they laughed and told me I’d be lucky to find my own.  That they’d offered this same deal to all the other people on the flight who had now been kidnapped and stranded and they’d taken all the good stuff.  

I looked around and there were three or four other stray people from the flight who were picking through luggage, looking for things that they could use. 

“Isn’t it better to take one and have something than nothing?” the guys asked me.  

I asked them how they got me here. They said they had drugged everything that went around on the service carts in the airplane and hijackedi t. 

And all I could think of was that I was Moving.  They had my laptop, my external, my pictures, my clothes, everything I owned.  I didn’t even have five dollars to give them someone else’s clothing to sift through for something useful. 

So I just left.  

I talked to people and wandered streets and ended up in the apartment I was supposed to be renting.  

My ex was already living in it.  

I looked out the window and it was Portland, and I was so happy to see it, but so devastated by what had happened and that I was now stuck there with her that I just started crying.  My ex was angry that I was crying, the same way she was when I cried after hearing she wanted to go sleep with other people an be poly, and I said it wasn’t to make her mad, it was because I was happy to see Portland.  

But I was devastated that I’d never get to be myself or make my own decisions again.  I believed I had made this decision somehow, and now I had to live with it.  Everything in the apartment was red, her favorite color, and I screamed thinking that I wouldn’t even be able to put a teal blanket on the bed again.   Those fucking red pots and pans I replaced were back.  The lighting in the place was red. 

She played music from this antique record player but too loud for me to hear over this weird ear problem I’ve been having for a few weeks.  She got mad when I couldn’t hear her through the music.   

She tried to show me something but I couldn’t see it quite clearly, and she got mad that I was playing around.  I tearfully explained that my left eye is damaged now.  It kept happening, with every upsetting thing that happened to my body without my control.  I’d had my widsom teeth taken out, my appendix nearly exploded.  

I just kept crying and crying and she’d get angrier and angrier.  

She left me alone to go do something and I just left, wandered the streets again and kept trying to tell myself, ‘This is what you wanted, you’re happy to be in Portland now,’ but then I’d remember that I was trapped and I just couldn’t keep it up.  

And then I started to logic too much and became aware it was a dream.  I started running purposefully toward the things in the dream that should have hurt or upset me, and when they vanished around me like holograms, I knew even more that it was not real.   So I’m screaming to myself, “It’s not real, just wake up,” but the dream responds by being more real, and suddenly I’m very deliberately feeling every grain of the sidewalk on my hands when I’m crawling on them.  I kept screaming it was not real and was back in that red apartment and I started smashing Everything.

The red record player with the too loud music, the red bedframe (containing a bed I didn’t fit into), red lamps, and those Fucking red pots and pans.  I shattered everything I could find.  

I don’t remember what finally woke me up.