Dreams are such fickle things.
I’ve always dreamt strangely. I mean, really strangely. Everyone’s dreams are weird, but I’ve had several people tell me with impressed shakes of their heads that mine are especially so. “Dreams are weird, but YOU, man. YOU dream in another category.”
I learned how to fly by throwing myself at the ground and missing (ala Douglas Adams) but I was really crap at it and could only hover a foot or so off the ground, and it pissed me off that everyone I taught the trick to was so much better at it than I, and then was desperately trying to fly better when Lucille Ball was trying to kill me for some reason, and she was chasing me across the rooftops as I tried so hard to get it right…
It doesn’t help that I dream very vividly, I can draw you maps of places I’ve been, I can remember the tiniest details. And some of them seem…Significant, somehow. Some more important than others. They stay with me for days. I write those ones down, and I try to figure out what they mean, if anything. Sometimes dreams are just dreams. They’re nothing more than your brain’s way of sorting out events and memories and people, in the background, when you don’t have to try so hard. Your brain takes ideas out of the toybox and sees how they work together. Usually it’s a jumbled mess, mine usually have a storyline. ‘m usually a far more powerful person in my dreams, someone with psychic ability or superpower or something outstanding. Someone who can fix things. My brain takes important ideas out of the toybox gently, trying them out for size, seeing how they fit, and usually putting them away before they get dirty. If I dream about work, I know I’m under way too much stress. If I dream about past jobs, I know there’s still some resentments there that I probably ought to work out. Sometimes my dreams show me things that need to be addressed, things that I haven’t admitted to myself, things I haven’t allowed myself to think about.
…And sometimes my subconscious is just an asshole. “Hey, I know you haven’t thought about your dad in awhile, so here’s a dream where he shows up at work and you have to be polite to him because you’re at work and in public and he makes small talk with you and you really want to like him but you just can’t, and now he’s introducing himself to your boss who is saying maybe they can find something for him in your department, yay, father/daughter work day every day isn’t that great!” “oooh, hey remember that girl you crushed on, like, 20 years ago? Here’s a fun little what if scenario where she confesses it’s TOTALLY mutual and right in the middle of happy makeouts your ex husband shows up and sits down even though you are hinting STRONGLY that he should go away and he tells her terrible lies about you, so she leaves, crying. Wasn’t that fun?” “Storytime! Everyone you love is dead and everything is ashes and darkness and you’re all alone and you hear a cat crying in distress somewhere but you can’t find it! YAY!”
I’m usually not disabled, in my dreams. Not yet. It takes a bit of time for something to seep into my identity to the point that it’s who I am when I am dreaming. My tattoos took ages to show up. I There have been maybe a small handful of dreams so far that have ALS in them. Usually it’s a sideline thing. One time I almost got into a fight because they kicked my cane or something, one time I wanted to do something but I couldn’t, because I didn’t have the ability. It’s usually a minor thing, nothing existential or terrible, just…this shows up as a piece of me, subconsciously from time to time.
But last night, in my dream, I sat and watched my four year old nephew happily playing with toy cars on the floor of my apartment, and was suddenly overcome with a terrible grief, that this kid would never know me as anything but disabled. And I woke up crying.
My brain is a DICK.