Just woke up. Yay!
In last night’s installment, I found myself in two different locations, the Los Angeles Valley and the Sacramento, California area.
SoCal wasn’t so disturbing.In that nonsense, I was in the middle of a thirty year old video footage of air pollution problems and citrus tree production, don’t try to make sense of that.
There was vintage footage of a 1980s news anchor showing an expert in citrus describing how to keep production up by inducing air movement over a grove by cutting the height of the trees at two levels. Seemed an elaborate and intensive pursuit.
Somehow things switched to the old Tower Books store on El Camino Avenue in Sacramento. It’s been closed for decades and I haven’t thought about it for that long.
There was massive sale going on and I found an old plant book of mine on the shelf. It no longer had a cover and was falling apart. I still wanted to buy it.
Some of my parents books were on the shelf. Io Triumphe!, which goes back to their days at Albion college. My Dad had copies in his den, heavy cloth binding and dark ink.
There was some mad person screaming down the halls that someone was stealing books out of the bathroom. The inventory seemed to shrink away as time passed.
A poster inside said that Tower Books had to close their Starbucks counter but this Tower never had a Starbucks. There was, however, an empty coffee counter at the end of the store.
Several people inside and outside of the store were killing chickens and such by wringing the necks of those animals. Several people were earnestly engaged in this activity, much to the stress and horror of those having to do it and to people like me who had to watch.
The end revolved around me having to kill a dog by wringing its neck, if I were to leave the dream.
Or, it could have to do with watching a young kid kill his favorite dog by wringing its neck.
Or, as I saw a nice white Labrador coming up to me, it could be that the dog was going to kill me by wringing my neck.
It’s hard to know what is going on in these nightmares.
NB: I never had a violent nightmare before the violent incident I experienced (internal link) so dream interpretation is worthless.
Interpretation might be useful if my nightmares started unexpectedly. Where did those come from? Let’s try to analyze the dreams! No. We have a starting point and a cause. All well known. Pointless to continue. Let me be clearer.
A war veteran with PTSD nightmares shouldn’t be asked about life before he saw someone’s face shot off, it is because he saw someone’s face shot off that he has nightmares. You get it now?
I know, I know, some will say, “What made him more susceptible to having nightmares when other people saw the same thing and are not having nightmares?”
If you have the time and the money to go down that rabbit hole, well, you are in a very well financed part of mental health that I don’t know about.
Certainly not a part of healing because I don’t see any answer to that question that has ever helped anybody. Make my nightmares stop if you are so damned smart.
Unless interpretation might help them go away. Which doesn’t work, in fact, documenting and analyzing makes my nightmares more concrete by giving them substance as they are recounted.
You’ll have more dreams or nightmares the more you recall them and especially if you write them down. Try it. You’ll see.
This recounting is a one off for unbelievers. I’ve had as many as five violent nightmares in a single night although that is rare. Usually only one or two. And in my afternoon naps, too.
I know everyone else has their own problems. Just don’t deny my misery because you can’t see it. I’m glad that you can’t.
Update:
Managed to get back to sleep after 5:00 AM or so. Had what I call a stress dream. For some reason all of my expensive lapidary equipment was outdoors on a balcony and it had all fallen off the balcony because of an earthquake and I couldn’t figure out how to get it back together because the entire building was sliding off its foundation and it was up to the landlord to get everything rebuilt so it would take time if it could ever get done and would I be homeless? and it was extremely upsetting, extremely upsetting and then I woke up.
Another night in my life ends.
And who cares? Cares enough to do something?
