Four Dreams

2013-02-14

My brain's been a little less than kind to me this week. It's Thursday now (Valentine's day), and I haven't yet gone to bed at 10:30 in the morning. There were no dreams last 'night,' but I had three on Monday and another on Tuesday.

Monday's dreams were quick and mostly pointless. The first was a dream in which I stood staring at myself in the bathroom mirror, hair combed down in front of my face in the most emo way possible. It was almost exactly like the 'bad' Peter Parker from Spider Man 3, except my hair was more of a grayish-brown than black.

I was thinner and younger, as is often the case when I see myself in dreams, but I had a hard time focusing on my reflection. As I stared through my emo bangs, my image in the mirror began to flicker; it was blinking rapidly in and out of existence, like something you'd see with a computer glitch. Eventually it stopped its wavering and began instead to pulse, blurry and transparent. As I tried to focus on the reflection, the dream ended and my mind moved on to something else.

The second dream of that night was fairly simple, but probably the most emotionally weighty of the three. It was just my mother explaining to me what a failure I was, and telling me that I was solely responsible for whatever various difficulties that either she or my father had to put up with on a day-to-day basis. I had bled them of all their potential and was continuing to drive them into the ground by my very continued existence. I had no words to refute hers, but the dream was very brief and ended not long after it began.

The next (and last for Monday) was even simpler than the second, and not particularly meaningful in any way. I was loading a magazine with bullets (.40 caliber if you must know), but toward the 'end' of the magazine's capacity I ended up having to load a round with a nick in the rim. It was aesthetically ugly and felt uncomfortable as I ran my finger across it. Someone behind me whispered something into my ear; I turned back to look (I didn't see them, since again I was viewing myself from a third-person perspective), and when my attention was again focused on the magazine, the troublesome round had 'healed' itself. And then, the dream ended.


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Tuesday's dream was worse than most of the ones I've had recently, even if it was comparatively indistinct. Once again, it involved Tara (shut up, don't even say it), except this time she was with a significant other. A husband, I assume.

The scenario in the dream was that I, and I alone, was living with my parents in a small, shitty apartment. Small and shitty as it was, apparently we were still destitute enough that we had to split rent with strangers -- the strangers in this case just so happening to be Tara and her husband. I wasn't thrilled with this, but there wasn't anything I could say about it.

Originally, my parents had the bedroom and I bunked in the living room, using the fold-out couch as a bed. After Tara and her man moved in, they got the living room (since they were paying rent and I wasn't), and the only room left in the house for me to sleep in was the bathroom. I'm not even kidding. The front of my bed was right up against the rim of the toilet - don't ask me why I slept that way instead of turning around - and a few times I found myself having to fish my pillow out of the crapper. Not a great arrangement.

The worst part of the dream, though, wasn't so much the sleeping situation as it was the feeling it presented to me. I've never felt like such a worthless nothing in all my life. My parents disregarded me entirely after Tara and her husband moved in, having basically 'adopted' them as friends, neighbors and surrogate children in lieu of me. Tara never once spoke directly to me, but instead spoke only of me in dismissive tones to my parents, the way a person might speak of an annoying child that didn't belong to anyone present. Her husband would only cast his gaze in my direction long enough to catch my attention before wrapping an arm around her waist and smiling almost imperceptibly.

I could do nothing about any of this, except wallow in my misery while trying to sleep with my head on the toilet rim.

Fuck that dream.