Saturday Upsides: Daydream Believer and The Power of Cranium

Upside time! I’ve still got three hours left of this Saturday so I guess this counts. And I’m being completely spontaneous right now. I had no intention of writing anything at all today, but I figure I’d live on the “wild” side just this once. I blame it on the sugar.

This has been a stressful week. Understatement of the year (all three weeks of it) but it was seriously challenging and I imagine if I checked my blood pressure, it would’ve been in the clouds. I battled writer’s block and struggled with some big personal issues. Then there were the dreams. I have trouble sleeping most of the time, but I know I’m off when I start having dreams, and I don’t mean the good kind. These leave a layer of weirdness draped over me the next day, like I’m still sort of half asleep. It’s…odd, for lack of a better word. I thought after I busted through the block and got my last post out that I’d sleep like a baby. Then I woke up this morning with that same residual yuckiness post-strange dream.

I’ve never been one of those people to really look into the meaning behind dreams. I don’t decipher symbols or interpret scenarios to find the metaphor and its relation to my life. It’s not to say that I don’t appreciate some of the inferences people can make from dreams, but it’s just not my thing. I can’t really say what my dream was about, other than it was some sort of survival type scenario where I was fighting to stay alive with a group of people who I didn’t recognize and then one part stood out to me and it was what was on my mind when I woke up. I had this moment in the dream when I sort of had a melt down (typical) about how much faith I’d lost in having a happy future when life was just about survival. Just what was the point in at all? was what I kept sobbing through big fat tears. And then I heard Nelly Furtado singing and it was my alarm jolting me out of bed.

Shoving the dream aside, I got up and went about my business. Run errands. Buy dog food and groceries. Pick up package at the post office. Bake birthday cake. Set up decorations. It was my niece’s fourteenth birthday today (although the kid is really 14 going on 30- seriously, she’s way more put together than I am) and I ignored that weird post-dream layer sticking to my skin so I could focus on enjoying the day with my family.

It didn’t hit me until about a half hour into playing Cranium with my niece, her dad, and my sister. We were sitting there laughing until we cried, goading each other to see who would win, and I just sort of felt that ‘off-ness’ I’d been feeling all week, had disappeared. I was partially sated by carbs and sugar and fully satisfied by the simple joy of just chillin’ with the fam. A winning combination.

Later when my niece opened her gifts and we helped ourselves to pieces of cake, I felt like I had shed a bit of light on a particularly dark thought. I can’t interpret dreams, and I won’t attempt to do that here, but that dream-speech I gave about feeling hopeless for a future that’s lonely and full of despair was an incredibly dramatic and overwrought projection of something I hold deep inside. It’s that gnawing fear of heading towards nothing that keeps me standing still in virtually every area of my life. Spending the afternoon with my family, especially in celebration of a truly amazing kid, sort of slapped me back, like a big, “Hello! Snap out of it now!” reminder that I have no reason to think that I’ll be alone or that there won’t be a bright future with happy moments like today. I’ve already proven to myself in the last couple of weeks that I can step forward to do things I’ve wanted to do and those have been HUGE accomplishments. Like I said last time, it’s a fight to believe that I’m ever doing enough to get myself there, but sometimes I just need the visual to put things in perspective. And that moment, at our kitchen table, with our ridiculous drawings strewn about, and my brother miming a speedo with clay was just the silly visual I needed.

I’m shrugging my shoulders right now. Who knows? I’m not a dream whisperer or a sage or whatever these people are called, but it’s all in my head and I spend a lot of time going through it, so I suppose I have some idea of what I’m talking about. Maybe my subconscious was looking for a way to get me to stop and smell the roses more often. I’ll be asleep soon enough (once I drain all this sugar from my blood) and hopefully I can finally have a good night’s sleep free of dreams or at least free of the memory of those dreams tomorrow. In the meantime, I’m going to bed with a bit of a smile and a laugh at a joke my sister and I shared about a chicken. I’ll keep that one between us.

Happy Saturday folks! As always, keep paying it forward. 🙂