I’ve decided to add a category to this blog called “dreams.” I have them once in a while. Not as often or as vividly as I used to, thanks to a certain furry alarm clock who likes to comb my scalp with her claws at random intervals during the night, but every once in a while, one sneaks through. While I was in Vancouver last week without said alarm clock, in a very comfy bed at the Marriott, one snuck through. It was last Saturday morning, my last day in the city. I still can’t get it out of my head.
I’m not going to write about the most personal ones or the dreams that aren’t either beautiful or meaningful in some way. I’ll just write about the ones that tell me something about myself, about the future (rare), or just look really really cool. I usually don’t recognize the ones that tell me the future until the future comes, so that will be a crap shoot. And that hasn’t happened in a while. I don’t think it has anyway. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out if there’s a connection between this dream and something that happened later that day, or if it was just visually coincidental. I actually think it’s the latter.
I woke up Saturday morning around nine. It didn’t take long for me to remember what I had been dreaming before I woke up. It was disturbing enough that it took me an hour to get back to sleep, and yet on my last possible sightseeing day I was determined to do that. I had to sleep it off if I could. I slept a little after that, but it didn’t help. The dream added a weird apocalyptic filter to the rest of my day, making me anxious, angry, and unwilling to be alone. It didn’t stop me from doing anything that day, but it made me weirdly detached from a lot of what I did. And pissed that I was having to do everything that day all by myself, and pissed that I was pissed about it because I’m not usually a needy person and it’s the last thing I ever want to be.
It went something like this: I was on the first floor of a brick office building. I worked there. There were about three floors above me. There was a bomb threat. They were evacuating the upper floors but for some reason they couldn’t evacuate mine. We were just going to have to stay there and hope it was a hoax. I wasn’t standing for that, so I left. I left the rest of my coworkers there, although I think they could have come with me if they had wanted to. Not sure. It was almost as if I’m the only one who knew we could leave if we wanted, no one else knew how to save themselves. I got as far away as I could and looked back, and the building exploded. I remember the smoke in particular as the building collapsed. It was thick but faint, like from a great distance, almost like dense dust. I went back to the building to see if anyone was still alive. Everyone on the first floor was still alive but crushed by the floors above, moaning, screaming for help.
Today I saw a video of the stage collapse in Indiana, which happened the same day I had this dream, and the dust rising after the stage came down on top of those people looked eerily similar. People getting crushed by a large structure also looked eerily similar. But I don’t think that was the message I was meant to receive.
After the building exploded, I went back. I was my usual calm-in-a-disaster self, assessing the situation but with an obvious sense of urgency. I looked around and realized no one was there to help, no first responders of any kind. I called 911. And then everything changed: I was hysterical, terrified, screaming on the phone for someone to come help as soon as they could. The response from the other end was a frustrated female voice saying, “We don’t have anyone to send out there right now. DO NOT CALL HERE AGAIN.”
I woke up afraid of the images I had seen and mad as hell. I tried to go back to sleep but it took an hour and then I only slept very lightly. It never went away. But it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was really about.
A disaster had occurred. Victims were everywhere. There was nothing I could do to help and no one was coming to help them. And no one was coming to help me. Probably because I didn’t think I needed any help. It was all for everyone else.
Anger is a normal phase in the grieving process, and I always expected at some point I would start getting angry at Paul for how abruptly he left my life. And yet the anger I feel right now is not at him. It’s not at any one person. It’s at the fact that I am dealing with this by myself and for some time now, I’ve been past the point in my life where I want to be alone. Of course I have friends, good friends. My best, best friends are back in Texas and can only be here for me so much. In California, I have people in closer proximity but they’re mostly acquaintances. The difference between a friend and an acquaintance is this: A friend says, “I’m here for you” and is there for you. An acquaintance says, “I’m here for you” and is there for you if he doesn’t already have other plans.
The friends I have, and even many of the acquaintances, deserve a lot of credit and appreciation for what they have done for me over the last few weeks. What I’m talking about is a problem I think I’ve created myself by being as independent as I am and having a history of not asking for help with anything. And by worrying too much about other people to even be a temporary inconvenience for my own sake. I’m an only child and I’ve handled everything myself for 40 years. I keep thinking there’s no reason why I can’t handle THIS, and THIS, and THIS OVER HERE all alone as well. And then I end up like I am right now. So maybe I’m wrong. Or something.
When people ask me how I’m doing, I say “ok.” It’s possible that I need to revise my definition of “ok.” I figure as long as I’m getting up in the morning, sleeping at night, eating regularly and going about my life in a relatively normal way, I’m “ok.” Except that I’m unbelievably angry now that I can’t really talk about what’s happened and what’s still going on. I am so afraid of burdening the people I care about the most with the darker details of what I’ve been dealing with, I just refuse to bring it up and then bring them down with me. A small piece of the story will escape here and there — probably out of necessity — but except for one close friend I work with, most don’t hear more than that because I usually squash it and change the subject immediately. I refuse to lean on anyone too hard or for too long. I refuse to say “I need to talk about it” because I don’t feel like I deserve to be heard by people who are normally happy and don’t need to be brought down. I’m scared of what will come out of me and what it will do to my friendships when others become uncomfortable with what they don’t understand and can’t relate to. So I say very little. In some cases, nothing at all. I guess when someone says, “I’m here for you,” I don’t really trust it. Because I don’t really believe they know what they’re getting into and as usual, I take on the responsibility of protecting them. From me.
And so I’m looking at the victims of this disaster screaming for help, and not even realizing I am one of them. That’s what the dream was trying to tell me. I am one of them and I need 911 to respond to ME. But unfortunately 911 is already occupied with something else. They already had plans, prior commitments, because I led them to believe I was already “ok.” What else were they going to do?
I’m not going to write about the most personal ones or the dreams that aren’t either beautiful or meaningful in some way. I’ll just write about the ones that tell me something about myself, about the future (rare), or just look really really cool. I usually don’t recognize the ones that tell me the future until the future comes, so that will be a crap shoot. And that hasn’t happened in a while. I don’t think it has anyway. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out if there’s a connection between this dream and something that happened later that day, or if it was just visually coincidental. I actually think it’s the latter.
I woke up Saturday morning around nine. It didn’t take long for me to remember what I had been dreaming before I woke up. It was disturbing enough that it took me an hour to get back to sleep, and yet on my last possible sightseeing day I was determined to do that. I had to sleep it off if I could. I slept a little after that, but it didn’t help. The dream added a weird apocalyptic filter to the rest of my day, making me anxious, angry, and unwilling to be alone. It didn’t stop me from doing anything that day, but it made me weirdly detached from a lot of what I did. And pissed that I was having to do everything that day all by myself, and pissed that I was pissed about it because I’m not usually a needy person and it’s the last thing I ever want to be.
It went something like this: I was on the first floor of a brick office building. I worked there. There were about three floors above me. There was a bomb threat. They were evacuating the upper floors but for some reason they couldn’t evacuate mine. We were just going to have to stay there and hope it was a hoax. I wasn’t standing for that, so I left. I left the rest of my coworkers there, although I think they could have come with me if they had wanted to. Not sure. It was almost as if I’m the only one who knew we could leave if we wanted, no one else knew how to save themselves. I got as far away as I could and looked back, and the building exploded. I remember the smoke in particular as the building collapsed. It was thick but faint, like from a great distance, almost like dense dust. I went back to the building to see if anyone was still alive. Everyone on the first floor was still alive but crushed by the floors above, moaning, screaming for help.
Today I saw a video of the stage collapse in Indiana, which happened the same day I had this dream, and the dust rising after the stage came down on top of those people looked eerily similar. People getting crushed by a large structure also looked eerily similar. But I don’t think that was the message I was meant to receive.
After the building exploded, I went back. I was my usual calm-in-a-disaster self, assessing the situation but with an obvious sense of urgency. I looked around and realized no one was there to help, no first responders of any kind. I called 911. And then everything changed: I was hysterical, terrified, screaming on the phone for someone to come help as soon as they could. The response from the other end was a frustrated female voice saying, “We don’t have anyone to send out there right now. DO NOT CALL HERE AGAIN.”
I woke up afraid of the images I had seen and mad as hell. I tried to go back to sleep but it took an hour and then I only slept very lightly. It never went away. But it wasn’t hard to figure out what it was really about.
A disaster had occurred. Victims were everywhere. There was nothing I could do to help and no one was coming to help them. And no one was coming to help me. Probably because I didn’t think I needed any help. It was all for everyone else.
Anger is a normal phase in the grieving process, and I always expected at some point I would start getting angry at Paul for how abruptly he left my life. And yet the anger I feel right now is not at him. It’s not at any one person. It’s at the fact that I am dealing with this by myself and for some time now, I’ve been past the point in my life where I want to be alone. Of course I have friends, good friends. My best, best friends are back in Texas and can only be here for me so much. In California, I have people in closer proximity but they’re mostly acquaintances. The difference between a friend and an acquaintance is this: A friend says, “I’m here for you” and is there for you. An acquaintance says, “I’m here for you” and is there for you if he doesn’t already have other plans.
The friends I have, and even many of the acquaintances, deserve a lot of credit and appreciation for what they have done for me over the last few weeks. What I’m talking about is a problem I think I’ve created myself by being as independent as I am and having a history of not asking for help with anything. And by worrying too much about other people to even be a temporary inconvenience for my own sake. I’m an only child and I’ve handled everything myself for 40 years. I keep thinking there’s no reason why I can’t handle THIS, and THIS, and THIS OVER HERE all alone as well. And then I end up like I am right now. So maybe I’m wrong. Or something.
When people ask me how I’m doing, I say “ok.” It’s possible that I need to revise my definition of “ok.” I figure as long as I’m getting up in the morning, sleeping at night, eating regularly and going about my life in a relatively normal way, I’m “ok.” Except that I’m unbelievably angry now that I can’t really talk about what’s happened and what’s still going on. I am so afraid of burdening the people I care about the most with the darker details of what I’ve been dealing with, I just refuse to bring it up and then bring them down with me. A small piece of the story will escape here and there — probably out of necessity — but except for one close friend I work with, most don’t hear more than that because I usually squash it and change the subject immediately. I refuse to lean on anyone too hard or for too long. I refuse to say “I need to talk about it” because I don’t feel like I deserve to be heard by people who are normally happy and don’t need to be brought down. I’m scared of what will come out of me and what it will do to my friendships when others become uncomfortable with what they don’t understand and can’t relate to. So I say very little. In some cases, nothing at all. I guess when someone says, “I’m here for you,” I don’t really trust it. Because I don’t really believe they know what they’re getting into and as usual, I take on the responsibility of protecting them. From me.
And so I’m looking at the victims of this disaster screaming for help, and not even realizing I am one of them. That’s what the dream was trying to tell me. I am one of them and I need 911 to respond to ME. But unfortunately 911 is already occupied with something else. They already had plans, prior commitments, because I led them to believe I was already “ok.” What else were they going to do?
