Nightmare on Allen St and July 11th

Saturday July 11

I have experienced nightmares my whole life. I get some pretty intense ones that leave me to wake up in my closet or screaming and crying. Usually after a nightmare like that I am a wreck the rest of the day because I am plagued by exhaustion and my mind keeps running back certain parts of my dream and I can’t focus. These nightmares are usually brought on by stress, so as you can imagine I’ve had many of them recently. My dad also has nightmares and I can't tell you the number of times that I've heard him yell, scream, flip out of bed or have an argument with himself. To an outsider, it may seem humorous to watch but when you're stuck in a nightmare, there are few things that are worse.  

I have been afraid of going to sleep lately and even though I am exhausted I would rather stay up because everything that I am internalizing during the day is being played out in some freaky and disturbing interpretation when I fall asleep and I wake up with my heart pounding and drenched in sweat. But, there are times where I am so tired during the day that I just have to succumb to it and hope for the best. Marco and I took a nap this afternoon. I had a horrible nightmare involving a snake again.  The dream was intense where I kept getting water in my eyes and ears, so I couldn’t see or hear clearly but we were all running from this snake. There was a group of us but the only people I could recognize were Darin and Marco. At one point our only hope to escape this snake was to hike down this really steep cliff and Marco was way ahead of Darin and I. I was having a panic attack that he was going to fall and I kept trying to quicken myself up to reach him and couldn’t. This voice was narrating my dream  and says, “Sometimes these things need to happen.” Hearing this sent me into a total panic because I knew something bad was going to happen but I couldn’t move fast enough.  I was screaming out of fear and sure enough, Marco slips and rolls off the cliff. I stand there paralyzed as I watch my baby boy fall off a cliff and into a pile on the dirt below. I am screaming and thrashing. Sick to my stomach, screaming, crying and ready to jump, I wake up to Darin sitting next to me. I can feel the tears streaming down my face and my throat feels sore from screaming. For the rest of the day I am dazed and feel beat up. In fact I don’t recall doing much after that besides sitting around with an ice pack on my neck because I can’t stop sweating or crying.

There are certain things that happen to us in our life that are too painful to remember or even think about. This nightmare was one of them. I am just plain sick to my stomach when I read over my journal and copy this into my post. Typing is hard because my hands are shaking and my eyes are tearing up. There is too much emotion packed into my situation to explain, but to have a dream like this is almost incomprehensible and I really don’t want to revisit it anymore, so this is where I am going to leave off for today.