Worry-Dreams

Hello All,

This time I managed to take a picture of myself much earlier in the morning, closer to when I actually had the dream. I'm going to narrate two dreams I've had since I've been a bit slack about writing my dreams down. The first one I had about two nights ago, and the second dream I had this morning. The first one will be harder to describe because much of it had to do with how the place felt and how I felt, not really how things looked.

A big family gathering of a friend of mine was about to take place. I was evidently a friend of the family as well, and was invited to stay over the night during the reunion. It was a very big house with a large yard, and wide deck, elevated about 8 feet above ground level by wooden poles. The house was three stories high, but the first and second stories were actually split level, which is the reason the porch was so high above the ground.

I felt uncomfortable about staying over, but it was one of those situations where it would insult the family if I didn't stay. Nightfall came. I was sleeping in a chair in the family room, along with other guests my age, who were distant enough to the family that they weren't able to get a room in the house. Everyone in the family room were either sleeping in a chair, on a couch, or on the floor. We joked (with a grain of sincerity) that we were the orphans of the house, and we should stay up all night, while they stayed up all day.

It's odd to be a guest, so you feel the need to "make yourself at home," but at the same time feel too uncomfortable in the host's house to really accommodate your needs. I find this often to be the case when visiting someone other than a peer. This is how I felt in this dream. I woke up in the middle of the night, and all the other "orphans" were fast asleep. I had to go to the bathroom, and decided to go to one on the bottom floor because no one was there and I'd be less likely to disturb someone. However, when I got down there, I felt if someone in the house heard me rummaging down there, they might think it was a burglar. Of course, the bathroom didn't have a lock, so I was afraid that if they did think it was a burglar, they might bust in the bathroom while I was using it.

Upon deciding this, I felt it was better to go to the bathroom in the main hall, on the second story (the same story as the family room). I went in the door, and realized it was a kind of mini-kitchen (perhaps for a mother-in-law suite etc). It was messier than the rest of the house and had someones personal effects all over the place. I even saw a pair of eyeglasses on the counter. I felt maybe I wasn't supposed to be there, but then rationalized the hosts knew they had a lot of guests, so should expect to have people using whatever bathroom, and then I woke up. The dream highlights my discomfort with being a guest (I've never been the kind of kid to go to slumber parties, and when I did I always regretted it).

Here is the dream I had this morning: The dream started with me searching a discussion board for answers about how to relieve my anxiety around other people. I typed in my particular inquiries thinking I was typing in a search engine box, but instead I was actually starting a thread, so everyone could see what I wrote and reply to it. I remember going back to the website and seeing that someone replied to my post, but since I didn't intend for it to be public, I didn't read the reply and continued my search.

I actually forgot what happened between that scene and the next one I'm going to describe, but I know not a lot of action intervened between the two. I was hiking in a forest with my friend Michael May, trying to divert myself from my worries. We had done the hike and I was still very anxious, so Michael pulled out two CDs and we both put them in our walkmans in our backpacks and continued to hike. The CD was of a man leading us through a path in the woods. The object was to follow the directions the man gave on the CD, and we were supposed to do everything at once and not pause, so we rushed through the forest paths following the recorded voice's instructions.

We came to a small canyon (so perhaps I should call it a ravine with a creek running through it). The creek at the bottom was only about 20 feet down the sheer walls of the ravine. It was very clear and shallow, but quick running over its bed of smooth rocks. There were three boulders that rose to just 4 feet or so below the cliff-top our path led us to. The CD told us to cross the ravine using the boulders as stepping stones, and said we could take no longer than 30 seconds to do this. In my head I pictured a man stepping off the cliff-side, falling forward with his foot landing on the first boulder, he then stepped-out with his next foot and fell forward. Perhaps because of the angle of the drop, he was able to bypass the middle boulder and fall with that foot planted down on the third boulder, he then leaped up to the cliff-side on the other side of the creek. Basically, the man I pictured in my mind (a mental manifestation of the directions I was being given by the CD) was crossing this ravine (about 20 feet wide) with only two steps and one leap.

It seemed very dangerous to me, if not impossible. Michael told me it was just an optical illusion, and that it was actually not that far from the first boulder to the third, and that the middle boulder was shorter than the other two, so you could just step past it. Our 30 seconds was nearly up, so I decided it was too dangerous, and quickly took an alternate path that led down to the ravine floor, across the creek, and up the other side. Michael decided to use the boulders as stepping stones like the CD instructed. He made it fine until he came to the leap off the third boulder to get on the other side of the ravine. He lost his footing and fell backwards, and landed on his backpack at the edge of the creek.

Since the boulder was already below the cliff-side, I figured there was a good chance he wasn't hurt too badly. I went down the path to the ravine floor and came to Michael. He seemed dazed and I went to help him up. That's when I noticed his CD player and his CD were shattered, which made me think he had a good chance of having a substantial injury. I helped him and we left to go to the parking lot of his work place (my former work place) to send him home or to a doctor. Michael was silent the whole time, and I began to feel something was wrong with him. As I walked him to his car, shards of the broken CD started to fall on the gravel parking lot . I tried to gather them up so no one would step on them.

As I was gathering the shards, I came upon very thin sharp pieces of glass, which I assumed came from Michael's backpack too, but as I collected them they started to break off and melt in my hands. I noticed there was ice, sleet, and snow all over the parking lot now. I got Michael to his car, and returned to the woods to go back out the path to where ever I came from, but I was stopped by employees of the store I knew from when I worked there. The snow was very deep now, and they were all drinking in the parking lot. I joined them, and started to feel very drunk, so I said to one of my friends there that I was going to stop drinking. He encouraged me to have some more, and I drank more. I then realized he was already smashed and was just trying to get me on the same level as him.

We went into the workplace because the people I was drinking with hadn't clocked-out yet, and wanted me to wait for them there. I stopped to say hello to my old boss, she looked very tired and work-weary. We went into the back of the store and I sat around while my ex-co-workers were tying the loose ends up to get out of work. Their supervisor was irritated with them because he said, "If you clock-out now your just going to have to wait till everyone else is ready anyway." I felt relieved to not be working there anymore.

Everyone was finished and we went back to the parking lot, that was now buried in high drifts of snow. I helped the friend with me get to his car because the snow was almost over our heads. He was parked at the edge of the lot, in front of a restaurant with people eating outside under an awning. The snow was so deep I had to turn around and do a sort of somersault to launch myself forward and get a little higher on the snow. The proprietress of the restaurant said, "He looks like he's trying to get away from something." I then reached my car, and the dream ended.

Thank you for reading,

Marc