Pursue “dream-work?” — or put it down to healthy REM sleep?
Rumination..by SGHolland

First thing I knew I was on the floor in the blackest of darkness, shaking off surprise and thinking I heard a loud noise.
It took some seconds of “being there” and thinking before I moved. I did not feel pain, just the utter surprise of being immediately “somewhere else.”
I had been dreaming. Before I moved I decided to wonder two things:
1. Was my daughter all worried because I had fallen out of bed — she sleeps in the bedroom above mine and worries.
2. What WAS it that I was dreaming just now?
Letting the spinning flakes of awareness settle down, and lying there, I asked my mind to grab that dream before I forgot it. I lay very still as I reviewed the last thing I was “doing” before the rude awakening.
It was a dream about being on a shelf or a ledge in a closet or something. I was keeping my legs tucked in because there was something evil and malicious grabbing at my legs, trying to drag me out into some danger — a life-or-death danger — and I was pushing myself as far back away from the edge, tucking my legs under my body while lying on that shelf. Pressing into the back of the closet. Sweating and driven by the adrenaline of fear.
And then I awoke. On the floor. In one instant accompanied by what had been a loud noise.
That was sufficient remembering — — now the thing was to get back up on the bed. The light was out of reach, so I was still in complete darkness.
I felt for the bed, found it, but the angle it was on was a surprise. I pulled myself up and flung at least one leg over the padding I felt and rolled back onto the bed. My daughter had not heard any of this — all was quiet upstairs.
I was not aligned with the bed yet. Feeling alongside of myself I wiggled myself into the “right” alignment and turned over and went back to sleep without turning on the light.
In the morning I swung my feet over the side and headed for the bathroom. Something was not right, I sensed. Then I looked back at the bed and realized the table next to it, and a crock full of reading glasses and pens was NOT THERE! No, it was on the floor! The glasses and pens flung across the carpet and underneath the dresser willy nilly.
I had tipped over the entire table. That would have contributed to the explosive sound I heard during my dead-of-night event!
Dream-work is something a therapist and I had discussed a lot during a period of my life about a decade ago. The things in a dream, she offered, were thought to be all elements of myself. The protagonist, AND the antagonist — the puzzle, the setting, and the emotions — all of it generated from my own psyche!
I used to write out my dreams and take them to her along with my own interpretation of the dream, given ideas I had been hearing from her. Doing that was actually a key turning point in a period of stress and confusion, and I was very much helped by seeing how my brain was expressing it in dreams.
So — this dream about a shelf and a “bad entity” trying to grab me for some bad purpose — was this something I wanted to address seriously as a clue to my own psyche right now?
Or is it simply an event of the rare deep sleep that I sometimes get in my semi-wakeful nights? A good thing, perhaps?
I find that hyper-realistic dreams almost always produce a certain relaxation — one from which I wake up noticeably refreshed and energetic! So I have welcomed them as good-news that my body was doing its restorative work overnight and helping me stay healthy.
I decided to treat my shelf dream with its sudden ending as a sort of comical pratfall during deep sleep that was in the catatonic state nature gives us when we would be acting out on our dreams — but my struggles to escape had skewed me sufficiently that I fell over the side. I decided it was a friend, not a demon.
I can report that I was totally asleep until I hit the ground. I was relaxed completely. I did not hurt myself. I was just an inert soft thing that landed and came to life.
Strange. Kind of neat. At least I got some good rest!
I wonder if that’s like dying? You then wake up rested in another environment?
SGHolland ©2017

