the mechanics of dream crying

I had the saddest dream last night. So sad, in fact, that I woke myself up crying (or maybe the dog barking woke me up; it was simultaneous). My husband and I were living (with other people, of course--I couldn't possibly have a dream in which I don't live in a group arrangement) in a rooftop apartment. It was really just a small box-shaped one-room building with extremely low ceilings, on top of the flat roof of an older building. I think the building itself contained a mixture of offices and apartments, and it wasn't in great shape.

We had been out and about and were returning home, if you can call such a living arrangement "home". It had been raining, and as we neared the top of the stairs leading to the roof, I noticed water pouring down the stairs from the rooftop. I made a note to let the building manager know (incidentally, the same guy who manages the building at my real-life office). It didn't really occur to me to be worried until we came out onto the roof and saw that it was completely flooded, almost up to the wall around the edges, which was about six feet tall. We could still walk through the water easily, but it was threatening to fill up the apartment to roof level. When we went inside, everyone was confusedly trying to gather up their things to evacuate. I looked around for our dogs with an increasingly sinking feeling. I asked someone about them, and just as they started to answer I brushed up against what was obviously one of their bodies floating around under the surface of the water*.

Of course no one had thought or had time to rescue our dogs, and it was terrible to think about them struggling to keep their heads above water in the middle of the crowded bunkbed setup (the room was filled with bunkbeds like a summer camp). I felt terrible realizing that if we had been there we could easily have gotten them out of there, and terrible in a different way thinking that if the roof had had proper drainage this wouldn't have happened at all.

I've always kind of wondered about the mechanics of crying in dreams, in those cases where you wake yourself up sobbing violently--how long are you actually crying in "real time" (it always seems to me like I cry for hours in the dream), and are real tears coming out? I still have no conclusion, but found it interesting that I woke up with tears in my eyes (but not streaming down my face) after what seemed like ages of crying. I also woke up slowly enough to note that I was gasping, sob-like, but my sleeping partner is a heavy enough sleeper that I've never been able to get an outside observation of whether I'm actually sobbing or just gasping.

Anyway, it was a harrowing dream, and I was very glad to hear the dogs barking when I woke up from it.


*This seems like a weird detail, that they would be floating around at a 3' depth, but I don't know enough about the physics of water and dog corpses to say whether it's really inaccurate. Another weird physics-related detail was that after we had removed the dog corpses from the flooded rooftop I was carrying them around in a garbage bag, casually slung over my shoulder--all 170 pounds of them, which I would surely not be able to do in real life, especially if racked by sobs.

Which reminds me of another gorily specific detail: I was carrying the dogs around because I hoped to find someone to flay them and preserve their hides for me, and also to remove and clean up their skulls so I could keep them as mementos**. When my husband expressed dismay at this weird and excessive desire, I said, "but think, don't you know any hunters who could do it? It would be easy for a hunter who was used to processing deer!"


**I probably shouldn't confess this, but I have considered in real life (although purely theoretically) the possibility of keeping the skull of a dead pet as a memento (in my defense, the hide idea hadn't occurred to me), although I'm sure I wouldn't due to a lack of butchering/taxidermy skills/cast-iron emotional constitution, and the fact that I don't know any local hunters.

yuck.

It's been a really long time since I had a variation on this dream, but just before waking up this morning I dreamed that my husband was openly ogling someone right in front of me.

I don't know what the context was, but we were seated at a table somewhere, maybe at some kind of outdoor event. To my left was a Diane Kruger lookalike. In addition to being incredibly beautiful and completely flawless, she seemed to have a perfect personality (unlike grumpy, neurotic ol' me). I think I had made a little superficial conversation with her because she was just so nice that I couldn't be antisocial and ignore her.

After we had exchanged a couple of sentences, my husband leaned over from his position on my right and started brazenly ogling Ms. Kruger-lookalike. I'm not sure if he actually spoke directly to her, but he was clearly completely smitten and I had hopelessly lost the battle of comparisons. I don't remember if I objected verbally to his ogling or if he just saw that I was disturbed, but in response to my irritation he started in on a list of her virtues and my deficiencies.

Up to this point the dream followed the usual template, but whereas usually I just slink off and disappear to nurse my hurt feelings elsewhere, this time I practically exploded. I first ranted at him that he was being really rude to Ms. Kruger-lookalike by ogling her so brazenly. Then I may have added that I didn't cotton well to his ogling of her either--I'm not sure if I verbalized that. I do remember going into his flaws, although I don't remember what any of them were other than a failure to do the dishes. I think I went so far as to say that I wasn't sure I loved him anymore. The whole dream was extremely disturbing, and the aftertaste was pretty disturbing as well.

sad but not traumatic, and no excrement!

I think my string of truly unpleasant dreams might have ended, although I had a somewhat sad one the other night. I ran into the guy who was more or less my first boyfriend, which is something I've dreamed several times (not because I'm still carrying a torch for him or anything, just because he was someone I cared about a lot and I've completely lost track of him). I was really happy to see that he was doing well, because he had been a little bit troubled when I knew him. He showed me a lot of drawings he had been doing (he drew a lot in real life), and they were really beautiful, mostly line drawings and slightly scientific/botanical/steampunk.

The sad part was that right after that, while I was still talking to him, a former elementary and high school classmate I had completely forgotten about showed up out of the blue, and said that he was in the army and was going to be deployed. I asked him where he was going, and he said Afghanistan. I found the whole thing extremely sad on several levels.

more and more ugh

The string of unpleasant dreams is continuing unbroken. The other night I dreamed that my husband and I were both undergoing some sort of hazing/trial period for a fraternity and sorority, respectively. And just before I woke up this morning, I was dreaming that a pleasant neighbor we had recently met (in the dream, not in real life) had abruptly committed suicide. In fact, I think it was the horror of that that jolted me awake.

money problems

I had a really sad dream last night. It was sadder in retrospect than while I was dreaming. My husband and I were breaking up--I say "breaking up" because I think in the dream we weren't actually married. Apparently we had been having a lot of issues (in the dream) about money management and autonomy. The plan was to remain friends and pursue some kind of semi-together-but-not-romantic relationship. I was resigned to it, since in the dream I was worn out from our constant conflicts. I wasn't too sad until we encountered a situation where he needed some kind of little thing--maybe a snack? I was going to buy the item from a convenience store with a couple of dollars in quarters, but he stopped me and told me that if we weren't going to be a couple anymore I had to pay with my card so we could strictly divide expenses. I got rather upset and said, "But for something that costs $2? What if I just want to give it to you as a gift?"

Anyway, it was an unpleasant dream to have not long before waking up. I think that right after that, and just before waking up, I distracted myself by moving on to some clothing-related mini subplot.

extreme changes of mood

I woke up in a great mood yesterday after dreaming several pleasant things (I don't think any of them involved Johnny Depp). The only thing I can really remember was that I had made a lot of headway on a freelance translation career and had been engaged to translate a real book, and a work of fiction at that! I was hopeful that this was going to be a launching pad for a specialization in translating fiction and that I would end up being one of those translators the merits of whose versions get debated in scholarly papers.

Last night's dream was awful. My husband and I had decided to take a little jaunt to Paris. I don't know where we were, but Paris was within driving distance. The only problem was that I wasn't dressed appropriately and couldn't figure out what to wear. I was very flustered and nothing was coming together, although I was pretty sure that my rose-colored turtleneck* needed to figure in somewhere. He got really annoyed really quickly and stormed out to drive away in the car because I was taking too long, ignoring my tearful entreaties to wait.

It turned out that he had only gone for a short drive because he was feeling antsy and didn't want to sit there while I had a closet meltdown, but it was still pretty harrowing. He came back after about 15 minutes, not mad at all, but I think I woke up before we could get to Paris.

*Notable because this is one of the very rare occasions when an item I actually own shows up in a getting-dressed dream.

Marriage

In an unusual twist on the wedding dream, last night I realized that my boyfriend and I had somehow gotten married. Concerningly, however, I couldn't remember having a wedding. When I thought back, I could "remember" some sort of ceremony, but without any of my own friends or family. When I realized that my mom hadn't been at my wedding, I got so sad I almost started crying. I thought that maybe the marriage should be annulled, since we hadn't even had a proper wedding. I was somewhat comforted by the fact that we could have a reception when we got back to Minneapolis, and that I could send cute invitations for that (I was thinking something with black and white stripes, vaguely French).

I decided to go to bed or take a nap, and to listen to my neighbor's "audio logs"--kind of a streaming audio blog, I think, and entirely a dream invention--for comfort. Somehow, though, I ended up at a party she was hosting, with a bunch of people I knew from various lives. One friend was telling me about the single-wide mobile home he'd bought with the help of another friend (she said she'd put in $1200, and when the housing market crashed, that investment had disappeared). My neighbor came over and asked me how I was doing, and I was about to tell her how sad I felt about the wedding debacle. Then I woke up, and was SO relieved that I wasn't married or in the middle of wedding business in real life!

canophagy?!

I can't take credit for this dream, but I found it dramatic and horrible enough to want to document. My husband dreamed that my parents were visiting and we were going to eat one of our dogs (the sweet, well-behaved one)! He had to kill her so she could be eaten, which he did by shooting the back of her head. I asked him if we actually ended up eating her, and he said he didn't know, because after that he had to go off and cry [he said he also wondered afterward, still in the dream, why we hadn't decided to eat the misbehaving dog instead]. What a terrible dream, especially for someone who hardly ever remembers his dreams!

doggie nightmare

I had a terrible, terrible dream the other night (morning?) just before waking up. I dreamed that my husband and I were on a trip and were going to stay one night in an avant-garde hotel. We were shown our room, and walked in to look at it. It turned out to consist of an empty carpeted expanse that slanted toward a one- or two-story dropoff into a lobby below. No railing or anything. Above this expanse was a white loft for sleeping (no furniture anywhere, although that didn't strike me as strange at the time). We had our dog with us, and while we humans were up on the sleeping balcony the dog lost her coordination, started slipping toward the edge, and fell over it.

It was awful! Of course she was dead, and I was crying hysterically (suddenly my mother was there for some reason, and also crying hysterically). To add insult to injury the snooty young staff members started talking about how "no one would be stupid enough to have a dog with them here".

I sometimes have dreams like this where I'm sobbing hysterically and I'm always curious as to whether I'm actually sobbing/hiccuping. I half woke up as I was crying in the dream and noticed that I was just breathing normally, although it was strange to be awake while still doing deep "sleep breathing".