The kind where you wake up in the morning and feel like you never really went to bed.
It started out with me staying up far too late watching ice dancing on the Olympics. What can I say, I got sucked in and before I knew it, it was 11:15.
A short while later, Noah called out to let me know he had a bad dream.
Lately, they have been about zombies. That was the case last night, too. I reminded him that I certainly had never encountered a zombie, reassured him I had the security system on (which is, evidently, zombie-proof in Noah's mind) and that I thought we were pretty good for the night and tucked him back into bed.
And two hours later I was the one jolted awake by my own bad dream.
Brian teases me that I have three kinds of bad dreams. He only has one. His nightmares involve spiders. And result in him smacking me in the middle of the night in an effort to kill them. Love it.
Mine? Well the first is the one where I am back in high school or junior high. Self explanatory, right? Nightmare.
The second one is that we are back planning our wedding and things are going horribly wrong.
And the third is where Brian leaves me.
The last one is the one I had last night.
Now it makes sense that it would come up in my dreams now as we are in one of those waves of being surrounded by friends having marital issues. We're good at our house, no worries. But when you see so many around you going through it, it's hard not to have it at the back of your mind.
So between the "high drama" of ice dance, the fact that I ate a chunk of string cheese and 10 Ritz crackers for dinner, and that the last conversation of the night was with a friend where we reflected on some of the marriages splitting up around us, it makes sense.
But between Noah's bad dream and mine, it made me think about how bad dreams can be such a reflection of your own present view of the world. Your own fears. Whether you have even articulated them to yourself or not.
If you are six, you worry about zombies. If you are my age, you still have strange little areas of your mind that evidently house old stresses or internalize new ones.
We got through the night. Zombie and divorce-free.
When Eli got up, I asked him how his night was and if he had any dreams.
He nodded and whispered, "Elmo and Cookie."
Gotta think he had the best night of all of us.
