9, 10 Never Sleep Again

No, I'm not dreaming about Freddy, but it's equally if not more frightening. When they say "morning people" or "night owls", I am definitely a night owl. Or at least I thought I was. My preference might be shifting.

My mood slowly starts to grow darker as the night does the same. I usually go to bed in high spirits, but there is a little voice in my head that screams TAKE THE ADVIL PM. Why? Because I often wake up during the night, and once I do it's game over. I might as well be living in an apocolypic version of the world. In the middle of the night the smallest concerns are equal to the threat of nuclear war and if I don't resolve them by morning, well then I might as well just crawl in a hole and die.

Yes, it's that dramatic. At least until 7am.

Waking up from a nightmare is something else entirely. And I'm having a recurring one again.

On several occasions in the past month, I have dreamed of my grandparent's house. Pop-Pop doesn't live there anymore, and Nana passed away many years ago. It was the house my Nana grew up in, as did her children including my mother. I loved that house as a little kid. There was a fantastic screened-in porch that today drives the fact that this feature is above most everything else on my current house hunt checklist. There was also a walk up attic that held the treasures of my Nana's old clothes & shoes. Hours of entertainment for my sister and I.

The bedrooms upstairs all had a theme...the Blue Room, the Gold Room and the Green Room...and picking which one you wanted to sleep in as a kid was pretty freakin' cool. The master bedroom was up there too, as was a bathroom with an old fashion tub with only a rubber hose for a shower.

In my nightmare, a darker, sinister version of the house I once knew taunts me. My dream never starts with the house, it ends with it, and what happens before I get there could be anything. I end up in the house when my dreams take a turn for the dark side...I'm put in a difficult situation, I'm scared or upset, or even just uncomfortable.

Just like that, the first part of the dream is a distant memory and I am standing in the foyer. I head up the dark wood stairs, and it just gets frightening once I reach the top. The emotion is the same, exactly the same, every.single.time. Something is there that I need to find that might hurt me (at least I think it's me). I go room to room--starting with Blue, then to Gold, where I look in the closet. But when I come out of Gold, I am scared to death of the Green Room, and the Master bedroom at the end of the hall, so I run back toward the bathroom, but end up walking up to the attic. The attic extends beyond what I remember to a hidden room at the top of an additional staircase, and I think, where the hell did that come from? I start to climb, and then I wake up.

I'm completely freaked out just putting that on (digital) paper. Even thinking about the house now in daylight evokes the dark version, not the one of my childhood. Which frustrates me beyond description because dammit, my childhood was happy and my therapist says so.

Finally, a few nights ago and the last time I had the dream, I recognized that I was there and it was happening again. It was the lucid experience of this nightmare. I woke earlier, before going into the attic. But I think it's what I'm supposed to do...go into the attic and all the way up. I am terrified of what will happen when I reach it, but I also feel compelled, yes compelled, to do it.

I have no idea what any of this means, but let's just say I'm sensitive to my dreams and if you've read this blog for any amount of time you know why. I can't make the dream happen, but next time it does I hope it brings more answers.

In the meantime, I will resort to Advil PM (if not valium) to ensure my damn eyes stay shut and the weight of the worlds' problems do not fall on my shoulders. Oh, and until I learn to control my dreams and again enjoy the night as peaceful.