In Dreams

"To sleep, perchance to dream
-ay, there's the rub."
--From Hamlet (III, i, 65-68)

The dreams have started.

Anxiety has a lot of different ways of expressing itself and mine comes at night. Yesterday morning I caught some footage of an air show crash on GMA and thought, naturally, of my stepdad. Last night I dreamed that he survived his 1989 single-plane crash only to become old, broken and bedridden by his heart problems. I saw him dying in a hospital somewhere -- I stood next to the bed and watched him suffer the death he might have had if he hadn't wrecked that Piper Cub. Even in waking, I can see his ravaged face in a sickly orange light.

After another late night with K and her overdue history project, I also dreamed I was back in college, doing my RA thing (my alma mater now calls them now CAs and PAs) and still trying to take care of my chronically ill cat. When I decided to go home for the weekend, I called to her and she tried to walk to me but she as she came toward me she was wobbling and falling over, meowing pitifully with each shaking step. In my dream I started screaming "Yasha Na!" "Yasha Na!" (see yesterday's entry).

At least I was spared the "finals-week-and-I-never-went-to-class-and-now-there's-a-test" dream. Or the "I'm-at-work-and-oops-I-have-no-clothes-on" dream.

But in case I thought I was the only one, K had a pretty rough night too. To spare her pride, I won't go in to detail. Suffice to say she didn't exactly wake rested and refreshed, either. Would that we both had the blessing that T has -- the sleep of the undisturbed. Nothing more aggrevating than lying awake next to a racked-out man who doesn't even have the decency to break his snoring pattern while I'm flopping around like a trout out of water.

TROILUS
To bed, to bed: sleep kill those pretty eyes,
And give as soft attachment to thy senses
As infants' empty of all thought!

CRESSIDA
Good morrow, then.

TROILUS
I prithee now, to bed.

-- Troilus and Cressida, Act IV, Scene II

If this makes no sense, consider it a product of sleep deprivation.