It’s a blessing . . . and a curse. I’m that person who not only dreams every single night — and even when I doze off during the day — but who frequently remembers each and every agonizing detail of many of those dreams. It’s no wonder I wake up exhausted.

Most of the dreams are not frightening, though an occasional nightmare will slip in here and there. There are a couple of recurring dreams from my childhood that I still remember clearly, and a few repetitious themes from recent years. When I relate some of these dreams to friends and family members, the most common reaction is this well-meaning bit of advice: “You really need to see a shrink.” And these are the people who love me! I’ve been thinking recently that they may be right, so I’m going to put this out there for a general consensus while I research whether Medicare pays for psychiatric evaluation . . .

But in the meantime, let’s start with the other night, when I died. Or at least I was being told that I was dead, and I refused to accept it. In my dream, it seems that I had just undergone some sort of minor surgery, and I was walking around the hospital trying to find my way back to my room. I was lost, and walked into a large room where several people, all wearing blue surgical scrubs and caps, were attending to a lot of corpses lying on metal tables and covered with sheets — clearly the morgue or the autopsy room.

When the attendants saw me, they were startled and frightened, and kept telling me I wasn’t supposed to be there. Someone shouted to call for the doctor. Just then, my surgeon (a former doctor from my real life) walked in, and was equally shocked to see me. He said I couldn’t possibly be there, and when I told him I was just trying to find my way back to my room, he held me by both shoulders and said, “But you don’t understand. You’re dead. You died on the operating table. You really can’t be here!”

Well, that’s not what I wanted to hear! I kept arguing with him, saying that I couldn’t die because my mother (actually deceased), my sister (ditto), and my babies (in real life, full-grown adults) would be terribly upset. How’s that for understatement? Anyway, that’s when I woke up. As you can imagine, it took me quite a while to get back to sleep. I’m reasonably certain that this was not a message from the Great Beyond; but if you don’t hear from me tomorrow . . .

*. *. *

Some dreams actually make sense, based on something currently going on in your life or in the world. One such dream recurred over and over during my early childhood — which also happened to be toward the end of World War II, when the movie newsreels were filled with scenes of the War in the Pacific, and focused mostly on the Japanese military. This was heavy stuff for a little kid, and I found myself having the same nightmare, over and over again: I was asleep in bed (my parents’ bed, not my own) when a Japanese soldier climbed through the open window. To escape, I jumped out of the bed on the side farthest from the door (not the brightest move), crawled under the bed, and ran out through the doorway on the other side. That was all there was to the dream, but I always woke up with my heart pounding. It took two atomic bombs — one each on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — to finally end the war and erase that dream from my little psyche. Then, of course, I started having nightmares about bombs.

I do still occasionally have dreams about being pursued, but nowadays it’s either by criminals or Nazis. Go figure. There are also dreams about shopping, driving or riding in a car and being lost (I seem to get lost a lot), not being able to find my car in a parking garage, searching for an unoccupied bathroom (that’s an easy one to analyze), attending the theater, or wandering through room after room of other people’s homes.

What? You were expecting something erotic? Sorry, folks; I’ll be keeping those to myself.

But my all-time favorite dream is a happy one from my childhood, and I would often go to sleep at night hoping that I would dream it yet again. The house we lived in had a dark, musty old cellar, mostly unused except for a room in which my grandmother stored her home-canned fruits and vegetables. In my dream, I opened the door to that room and found, instead of jars of pickles, a long, brightly-lit corridor lined on each side with more doors. And behind each of those doors was an answer to a child’s fondest wish: toys, sweet treats, beautiful clothes, flowers, or puppies and kittens and ponies (oh, my!) — all in full technicolor. I can still see myself in that dream, skipping from room to room, playing with the toys, smelling the flowers, hugging the puppies. The wondrous innocence of childhood, all wrapped up in a single dream.

*. *. *

Eliza Doolittle dreamt about a warm room and a box of chocolates; little Mary Lennox had her Secret Garden; and I . . . I had my cellar full of goodies. And in my memory, I still do. “Oh, wouldn’t it be loverly . . . ?”

Sweet dreams,
Brendochka
8/9/23