Sweet Dreams?

ejaugsburg via Pixabay

Lately, I've been having the most bizarre dreams. Friends and family appear in strange locations, strange situations and even stranger permutations. As is true with most dreams, there's often an element of danger or the unknown.

Most of the time, I wake up puzzling over where we were, how we got there and how it was even possible that such a disparate group of people ended up together in the first place. Sometimes, I wake up with a feeling of foreboding as well.

Sometimes, the dreams linger, despite my best efforts to brush them aside. I'm not a dream researcher or analyst, and much prefer dream-come-true dreams where we come into millions of dollars and sail around the world, our house and all our bills paid off. If dreams have meaning beyond entertainment value, or a nudge into action in the real world, I'm not really interested. In fact, the inexactness of that sort of speculation makes me more than a little nervous.

And so I search for logical explanations. Worries I've buried, stresses more stressful than I give them credit for. Fears.

But mostly, I just want to go back to sleep.

Sometimes I can. Other times, the dreams pick up right where they left off, like the bear dream from when I was five. He just kept chasing me and every time I woke up in relief, then fell back to sleep, he'd chase me all over again. To this day, I forget the dream itself, but remember that there were caves, which might have been just as scary as the bear.

I don't know what to make of these grown-up versions of the bear dream. I like seeing all the people who show up (there's that entertainment value I was talking about) and wondering how we all got together in some bizarre place I'd never been. Last night's dream featured a town with a huge church, a rustic inn and a diner whose menu was set up like a newspaper. The food items needed to be puzzled out of news stories and I felt completely inept because I couldn't figure them out.

Okay, maybe that last part makes sense.

I'm not sure what to make of all of this. I do know that a good night's sleep is hard enough to come by when you're over fifty, and I don't appreciate all these commercial interruptions.

Maybe I'm getting more sleep, and finally getting enough REM sleep to have dreams. Maybe my fondest wish is a huge party somewhere where all of my friends and family are in one place, even though I've never been to this place and half of the guests don't know the other half.

I don't know. Maybe the answer will come to me in a dream.

Or maybe I'll just roll over and go back to sleep.