Part II: The Rest of The Story (aka The Part Where I'm Psychic)

Last night's dream had a similar theme as the ones mentioned in the previous post, but it felt a hundred times more real.

You know how you remember a dream differently than you remember an actual event in your life? There's a difference to them. A different sort of... well... film quality. Or type of film. 8mm vs. digital. Or something. The dream last night though, I don't remember it as I would remember a dream. I remember it as an actual event. An actual memory. It just doesn't have the same... texture to it. I am starting to remember less of it, though. It's starting to fade like a lot of dreams do after too much attention is paid upon them.


I 'woke up' sometime last night and heard footsteps pounding up the stairs. The footsteps appeared to be no louder than when the HB normally runs up the stairs. This time, I think, this is the real thing. It's not like the last dream. There's no exaggerated shaking of the floor. This sounds real.

Looking back on it now, it took too long for the footsteps to reach the top. It took just long enough for me to rationalize how 'normal' they were. And thinking that this wasn't a dream like last time should have been a tip off, but you don't always think like that in dreams. At least I never have.

So in the dream, I remember thinking, how nice, the HB got off of work early.

I sensed or heard him come in to the bedroom. There were no shaking / pounding footsteps like before, I just knew he was there. He came over to my side of the bed and placed a kiss on my cheek. I remember smiling inside, as I usually do when he does this. I tried to say, 'hey babe' in a dreamy half-asleep voice but I had trouble talking. Which is weird to me in the dream because I thought I was more awake than that.

You know how some times it's a struggle to wake up in the morning? Like a real struggle to actually physically wake up and be able to move muscles and have rational thought? You're lying there with two options: you could give up, give into the void and sleep for another 10 hours, or fight your way out of the fog and emerge into Awake Land.

That's what this was like. I couldn't move. I couldn't talk, like I wasn't awake enough to talk yet, though my mind was clearly awake. It almost made me panic. What's wrong? Why can't I talk?! I struggled just to moan so that the HB could hear me. I really wanted him to know that I was awake, that I wasn't just sleeping. I'm not sure why. Once I made a little bit of sound I tried talking again. It was still a struggle, an abnormal struggle, but I managed to quietly mumble 'hey babe.'

And that's all I remember. I woke up later, for real this time, and realized that the HB wasn't home and that I'd had another dream.

It was so real, and nothing about it feels like a dream. Well, other than the warping of time. The pounding footsteps took too long to climb the stairs. And why didn't I hear the HB come into the apartment and shuffle around the living room before coming into the bedroom? So there was a small leap in time there. Oh yeah, and the whole 'I can't talk' thing was a bit creepy and eerily dream like. But other than that... :)


And now on to the part that really had me spooked.

The dream woke me up around 5:30 this morning, and since I had the alarm set for 6:00 I decided I might as well get up and write the dream down while it was still fresh in my head. So there I am, sitting on the couch with paper and pencil, writing about the dream I just had, as well as writing about the similar dreams I had a couple of weeks ago.

And as I'm thinking about the last batch of dreams I remember that they happened on the same night that the HB got into his car accident. They happened right before the HB phoned me for a ride actually.

And I think, holy crap! What if I've become psychic and he's in trouble again! I think about calling him, but then realize I'm just being silly. I think about the similarities of the dreams, and what happened differently this time, and then I think, holy crap! What if he's dead and that kiss was him saying goodbye like he tried to do in the last dream but didn't because he didn't actually die but this time he did and oh my god I'm psychic!

It made total sense to me. The pieces totally fit together. A couple of weeks ago he was in an car accident. A car accident that he could easily have died in if just a couple of circumstances were different. With the dream I sensed the perilous danger he was in, but there was no kiss because he didn't need to say goodbye to me. This time, the dream was different. This time there was a kiss. I've heard the stories about people seeing loved ones around the moment they die, in visions or whatnot, even though the loved ones are far away at the time of their death. It's a freaky phenomenon that I totally believe in, though its never happened to me before.

This morning though, I seriously thought it was possible that it could have happened to me with that dream. I was pretty sure nothing bad had happened. I mean, things like that don't happen to lil' ol' me. Yep, pretty sure about things was I.

But I still jumped off of the couch, raced for the phone, and called the HB. Just to be completely sure.

He answered the phone and I felt relieved. He was fine. Nothing bad had happened. He hadn't come home in the middle of the night, it was all just a silly dream. The boyfriend is fine. And I am fine. Well, now I am, after I've had a few hours to let the anxious adrenaline drain from my body.

I don't want to have this freaky 'seems so real' dream any more. I don't like it. I want to have dreams like the one I had a couple of days ago in the interim between the freaky faux-reality dreams. In that dream I was hanging out with my girlfriends and John Heder, the dude from Napoleon Dynamite, and some of the girlfriends and John start smoking pot and I for some reason become keeper of the small cardboard box where all the lit joints go and one of the joints is rolled up like a tube of toothpaste and while I don't know much about smoking pot I do know that that just doesn't look right but I figure maybe I'll smoke it anyway and sneak into the kitchen where no one can see me because I'm embarrassed and don't know what I'm doing and...

Yeah. Those surreal celebrity dreams are much more fun to remember.