Dreams Are Boring To Everyone But Yourself
After the little one is silent, when the caffeine has worn off, sleep finally shows up fashionably late to the party. Sometimes it brings dreams along with it, and when it’s feeling particularly rowdy, it’ll invite along a nightmare.
I had a terrible one last night. I won’t bore you with the full details, because really, the only people (other than yourself) who are most likely interested in hearing about your dreams are lunatics and people who are extremely attracted to you. Maybe not even those.
It’s just a fact. Whenever you’ve told someone about a dream that was absolutely fascinating to you, the chances are good that the glazed look and wandering eyes of your listener were not from their fevered effort to visualize it in every detail.
Okay, all I’ll say about my nightmare is that it involved me crapping in my pants, using a whole roll of paper towels to wipe and the world being devastated suddenly by nuclear war. Party time. This is the thing though, it was sooooooo real. Yeah, it was one of those. The kind where you wake up and slowly realize, “Uhhhhhh… Hey wait, that didn’t happen!?!” Which was an easy question for me to answer this morning because the world was not a ball of atomic fire and my rear end didn’t feel like it had been belt-sanded.
These good-as-real dreams can be fantastic. Flying like a super hero! Winning the game! Discovering toilet paper! Yay! You want these to last forever. But the bad ones? Man!!! I sure didn’t want this one to last a minute, but as if the dream were taunting me, it just stayed with me all day like nightmare fallout.
It put my mind to thinking of my boys’ dreams and nightmares through the years. You could always tell the good ones from the things they muttered to the positive body language, like a snoozing puppy’s tail wagging. The bad ones were also hard to miss since they announced themselves with the fairly effective alarm sound of my boys’ screaming and crying.
As much as I love watching them sleep within their sweet little dreams, and despite all my concern about their terror when the boogeyman invades their dreamscape, I still find that it bores the unholy crap out of me to hear the retelling of their dreams. I’ll sit there and listen, smiling encouragingly or wrinkling my brow solemnly, depending on the dream. Then my eyes glaze and start wandering as I wonder how stocked up on TP we are.