Thursday, 08/12/04 - 10:20 pm.
Just lately, over the six months or so (hey, relatively lately), my dreams have turned against me. I used to take pride in my lack of nightmares, as I don't remember more than five nightmares, macabre dreams, throughout my whole life. For me there are no nightmare, just bad dreams.
But Joseph once told me that a bad dream is a nightmare. And if we're going to get technical about it then, I've started to have nightmares very often, all related to my death, and sometimes including the death of a loved one.
The first dream in which I die that I can remember happened a long time ago, and it was short and sweet: someone knocked on my door, and my babysitter (I don't know who) opened it. A man was standing and he looked at me. Hi, mister, I said stupidly, what do you want from me?. He took out a knife and the dream ended when he was going to start stabbing me.
I'm almost entirely positive that dream has to do with a certain event: when my first nephew was one year old (two at the most), he was with his babysitter and two men broke into my brother's house. They didn't really hurt my nephew nor the babysitter, but such event is very traumatizing. So I tend to blame that dream, that didn't really scare me, on that happening.
But like I said, lately I've had dreams like those, in which I have to force myself to wake up in order to avoid witnessing my own death. The group of ghosts that threw a staircase on me, the giant cyclops that squashed me to death, the night planet earth crumbled, the river of lava that swept me off, and let's not forget the lady who jumped off a plane on fire and landed in front of me, staining me with pieces of her flesh and blood. To name the latest.
I woke up at 3:30 this morning, after a paralizing dream of many phases: the brakes of my car weren't working so I ended up on the pavement, next to my completely wrecked car. Then I went on holiday with two of my brothers, the three kids (nephews and niece) and my dog Frog. We left the house, we drove for two hours and -to our surprise- we came back to the house, that'd become a bar. In that bar we heard a voice: beware of the terrorist attack, if you are in the area of the dam, evacuate inmediately.
My house is definitely not near any dam, but in my dream it was. So I looked up the hill and I saw explosions, and then I heard and saw all that water coming to us. The kids started to cry, and I just wanted to tell them it was going to be alright, although it wasn't. There was no way we could make it out alive. I was going to run, but I convinced myself that it was just a dream, that I had to wake up.
I opened my eyes, and I looked around. Usually I'm not afraid of the darkness, but I'm very prone to be, as soon as I start imagining, against my own will, ghosts and voices in my bedroom. Night is when all the demons come out, or so I've heard (or did I say that?...or both).
I had to turn on the light, and I looked for Frog (she was in my dream the whole time)...she was peacefully sleeping on some clothes. I feared falling back asleep, and I wished to have someone next to me. Anyone (particularly, my mother or my boyfriend). I just didn't want to be alone, in darkness. I wanted to cry, I wanted to erase the dream, I wanted to talk to someone. Now that I write it down, it sounds stupid, but it scared me. Just like all the other dreams have.
I briefly told my mom about the dreams. She says I must find the roots, what I'm really afraid of. I think I started to have all those dreams since the invasion of Iraq (now it's war, but it begun as an invation, didn't it?). I have a particular repulsion for war, even if Joseph says wars increase the speed of human progress, scientific development. He's got a point, but I have my own, and I couldn't care less about human progress (read bombs and guns). I can't conceive the magnitude of the tragedy...or maybe I do, and that's why I'm having those dreams.
I'd blame my dad on the last one, he's the one who said God forbid the terrorists think of blowing up the dam. There's a terrorist threat, I think I've mentioned that, so everybody is a little tense. I've heard jokes: but we don't have tall buildings, but we're never at the office at 8:45. They ease the tense atmosphere, but I stuck to my dad's statement. I'm constantly coming up with new places that can be a terrorist target, as if thinking of them can make the threat disappear.
I am scared and shocked. I pick the newspapers up everyday, I read them over my cereal and before I take a bath, and it's just bad news. EVERYTHING is bad news. And perhaps I've buried myself into drawing trying to escape reality for a while. I'm not the type of person who runs away from reality, but it's hardly bearable. The two year old beat-up to death, the fifty criminals who raped and mutilated a woman, the murdered students. And that's one page of the newspaper.
I am so scared. I've never had an anxiety attack, and perhaps I never will, but this thing I'm feeling might be the closest to it. I don't even know what I'm really scared of. I just want to cry and I feel I'll start shaking at any second. I don't want to be scared, I want to be brave. I mean, life goes on, after all. I'm not in any more danger than anybody else...ok, that's a bad way to put it...say, I'm not any less safe than anybody else.
But it doesn't help that today, while driving, I almost got hit in the driver's side by a truck. I inmediately forgot the moment, but the truth is a distance of six feet saved my life.