Dreams

I am a big dreamer. Always have been. If I had to name the first prayer of mine that was ever answered, it would be the one where I asked not to have any more bad dreams. I don't remember what used to haunt my childhood sleep, but I remember distinctly when my dreams took a turn from the scary to the more tolerably confusing.

I don't remember every detail but I can usually give you a good summary by morning. And more than anything else, I can tell you exactly how that dream made me feel. It is usually because the emotional response is still lingering and I have to talk my body out of the false response.

The response that has regularly infested my dreams for over a decade now is guilt. I wake up feeling guilty on a frequent basis. For a girl who has tried hard to live a good life, my subconscious makes some seriously bad choices.

It all started in high school where I had two reoccurring dreams. The first, I was a smoker. The second, I was a teen mom. They were really vivid dreams and always very similar. There was more than once I would wake up from my smoker dream and my first thought would be if I had any more cigarettes. Yeah, weird.

My teen mom dreams were even worse. I never had a child, I was always just pregnant. The dream usually involved friends and family, concerned for me, asking me questions about my current predicament. I never once had an answer to who fathered my baby and on more than one occasion, I woke up wondering to myself, if only I could remember which one was the father. Seriously, so bizarre.

Then, after getting married, the dreams changed. The new theme was even more disturbing. I am often younger, late high school or early college and I am dating someone but very early on the dream I am vividly aware that I am married and I am going on this date anyway. It is always with someone not nearly as attractive as my actual spouse. And, once my subconscious remembers I am married, the guilt hits hard and sticks around all dream long.

The worst post married dream I have leaves me on the verge of tears because I feel so guilty. There is something I am not telling my husband, something about my dubious non-existent past and it is plaguing me. I wake up trying desperately to just tell Jon all about some past event that never actually happened.

And now, the reason for this post. My dreams have taken yet another turn. Still on the theme of guilt however. Now, in my dreams I eat. I show up to a party or random get together and just start eating whatever is there in very large quantities. It takes me a good several minutes of gorging myself when I remember my poor dairy-free little baby. I then spend the rest of my dreams lamenting how sad my poor child will be the next day after having to ingest all of my dairy filled foods.

I am not sure yet but there is a chance my subconscious thinks we're Catholic.