Withdrawal Symptoms

I woke up at about 4 am breathing hard and shaking from experiencing a long and fairly linear dream filled with fear and fire and impending loss. This dream was truly one of the worst I have ever had, so vivid, so terrifying. I hope I never have to experience in waking life what I did last night.

Especially when my return to sleep about 40 minutes later allowed me to drop back into dreams that referred over and over again to the out-of-control and steadily encroaching fire. Death! Destruction! Anxiety! When I woke up again, that was it, I got up and stayed up.

I've written a lot about dream interpretation -- my book Dreamer relies heavily on that subject -- and although I didn't really want to dwell on the nightmares, they were so powerful that I simply had to examine them.

All the symbols in a dream are my own symbols; every aspect of the dream is an aspect of me. I am the people in the dream to whom I shout a warning and push out of the burning house. Efficiently I gauge my time against the encroachment of the fire and save my artwork, worrying about my creativity even before I count heads to make sure I saved everyone. But I didn't, and I am also the person still inside who sighs fatalistically at me when I return to the house to save her, a person unwilling to bother braving the mounting walls of flame, apathetically following me as I pick our way through the destruction. I am the fire, the out of control enemy that terrifies me and threatens all our lives.

Key Points: I save people. I save my artwork. I save even one who could care less. And possibly most significantly, the enemy is out of control.

I was competent in my dreams; both times I stepped past the fear and did what had to be done, and woke from the nightmares. But oh, that Out Of Control monster, appearing as fire and death. Now what in my life would spark fears of being Out Of Control?

See previous blog entry. After I wrote it yesterday, I took off my watch and put it away in another room. That damned watch and the micro-manager in my head teamed up to scare the crap out of me.

But now I'm onto them. And I'm still not wearing the watch.