We're in a 6 person plane and my older brother Vinni is flying it, which should be making me very nervous because he's blind but I'm enjoying the flight. My grandmother is with us, along with my mom, and my brother- just the four of us. We are flying from Vegas to Texas, where we all were born and we're flying back there (in the dream I live there. This is all before kids & Dustin.) We're flying and the colors are very antique looking and muted but vibrant. We see this tree with thin but strong branches and all of us land in it and are sitting in various parts of it at different levels so we're kind of separate in a way. The plane didn't crash though, it just no longer exists as we land in the tree. We're looking around and everything we see is so beautiful. We see fields, a busy city in the distance, blue sky, I see four billboards for my friend Mae's breastfeeding photography business... it's kind of quiet and I notice that I'm praising god to myself just kind of reflecting and thanking him in my head and smiling and then I hear my grandmother doing the same but out loud and she's saying hallelujah with the letters mixed up so it sounds like hellulajah and my brother is softly singing a folksy song and my mom is kind of humming...... In the dream though, I know that we are all praising God. I jump down from the tree and don't have shoes on and land in a nest of lightening bugs, which creates a huge hollow hole in my heel and I can't get them out. There are four of them. My mom is really worried and says that she'll get them out with tweezers when we get back to my house.
The house I live in is candy apple red with white trim. It's old and needs work. It is shared by a few other people. I go inside and it smells. There is music coming from my bedroom. As I walk through the hallway, I look over to the room across from mine and it looks like it's rotting. It's gross and dank and dingy. I feel some water land on my arm as I stand in my doorway and look to see that an old boyfriend is shirtless in my room with wet hair toweling it off. He is one of my roommates. We have words and a fight ensues. It just sounds like angry noise though, not words. I find out that when I was gone on my trip to see my family in Vegas, he had stayed in my room. (His room was the one across from mine.)
I'm really upset at his disrespect and start to cry. I feel like he's taken my room, my sanctuary and invaded it. I've forgotten about the lightening bugs in my heel and how badly they sting. All I can focus on is the wet, dusty, beer-cigarette smell and it makes me sick. My mom comes and comforts me and we talk. We walk outside. She says all of the things that you want to hear someone say about your EX when they've wronged you. He's an asshole, he's a liar, he is abusive, he isn't a man, he will never be loved because he is unlovable, he's filthy and disgusting..... Her words are sweet but they are no consolation to me, instead they make me feel as dirty as she's explaining to me that he is in her mind. If I was once with him, I must be all of those things too. (In the dream we are no longer together but living as roommates.)
I walk back into the house and from the corner of my eye I see a tall figure with dark hair standing in the Ex's room picking up the cushion of a chair (which had mold on it) and scooting the chair into place in the corner of the room. He picks up an old dirty plate with food caked on it and I hear the fork hit the plate. He never turns and shows me his face but he's in that dank, dirty room cleaning it up and moving things around-fixing things........ I walk down the hall and out the front door wiping tears from under my eyes and the dream ends.
I wake up and my heart is beating out of my chest. I am wide awake blinking my eyes in the dark trying to relive and remember all of the tiny details of this dream. I'm trying to decipher between the fantasy of the dream and the reality of what it could mean. I think about the beautiful colors in the dream, how motherly my mom was towards me, my blind brother flying a plane, my grandmother praising God....the pain of walking into that house and the smells I smelled-seeing his face. The hate and hurt that I felt being trapped between those four walls with him in that moment. What did it all mean. Did it mean anything at all? I haven't had a dream this vivid in years. Was there a story to be told. Should I pray about it and wait for God to help me understand or could it be one of those mysteries of life that never gets told. Was it void of meaning and I'm over thinking it?
*Also in the dream, we visit Target and I buy a toddler-sized Big Bird Halloween costume & I misplace my phone! Imagine that, me misplacing my phone. I spend about a half hour every few days searching the house to find it usually sitting in the cupboard next to the coffee grinder or in my underwear drawer. True story.
We watched that movie Blue Valentine again this week. We had gone to see it at the theatre back when I was 12 weeks pregnant with Elle and it caused me much anxiety. I sat and cried for a long while after the credits rolled. Not a few cute tears, I'm talking snot down my face-loud-gross crying....It stayed with me and I thought about that movie for weeks afterwards. This idea that this young girl ends up adopting the same dysfunctional marriage that she grew up seeing her parents live and is in an emotionally damaging relationship....they start out so in love and their story is so unique and beautiful. It felt so real, which is why I couldn't stop thinking about it. (just rent the movie and you'll get what I'm saying.) The end is so heart wrenching and sad. It's like a roller coaster ride. You kind of feel like the happy parts and the uncomfortably sad parts are blows to the gut. It's happy and beautiful and hopeless and sweet all in this big mess of dysfunction, which sent me back to a time in my life when dysfunction was normal and peace was something I never knew how to experience- or wanted to experience. It's kind of like when people get addicted to the feeling of sadness. You created a warm, cozy bed of grief and you get comfortable in it and never want to come out. This movie felt like it was a trigger for me. Like a post traumatic stress trigger that brought me back to the past and resurfaced thoughts and emotions that I had healed from but were being hashed out again through this movie.
I felt like I needed to talk it out with Dustin and process this movie which set me off on a mild anxiety attack of the "what if's" of life, just as I had before in the movie theatre. BUT it's Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, the girl crush of all girl crushes! How could you NOT watch it? I'm just obsessed with her on every level. I'd kind of love to chop my hair off one day to look just like her gorgeous blond short hair. Back to the anxiety attack after the movie. Dustin and I had that conversation about what our lives would have looked like had we never met and what we'd be doing. What if I had gotten knocked up with the EX's baby or what if I had married him instead of Dustin. The thought alone makes me shudder. The movie felt like a mirror of what my life could have looked like and imaging that puts me back to that dark time when that could certainly have been my reality.
It was a beautiful dream though, even though I woke up with the same feeling you feel after you have a nightmare. My brother was smiling and having so much fun flying that plane and we do dream of one day living in Texas, so that part of the dream was nice. Everything else just filled my heart with chaos.
If anything, the dream and that movie make me feel very grateful to be in the place that I am today.
*I wanted to turn off comments for this post just to get these words out of me without anything coming back in return.
The house I live in is candy apple red with white trim. It's old and needs work. It is shared by a few other people. I go inside and it smells. There is music coming from my bedroom. As I walk through the hallway, I look over to the room across from mine and it looks like it's rotting. It's gross and dank and dingy. I feel some water land on my arm as I stand in my doorway and look to see that an old boyfriend is shirtless in my room with wet hair toweling it off. He is one of my roommates. We have words and a fight ensues. It just sounds like angry noise though, not words. I find out that when I was gone on my trip to see my family in Vegas, he had stayed in my room. (His room was the one across from mine.)
I'm really upset at his disrespect and start to cry. I feel like he's taken my room, my sanctuary and invaded it. I've forgotten about the lightening bugs in my heel and how badly they sting. All I can focus on is the wet, dusty, beer-cigarette smell and it makes me sick. My mom comes and comforts me and we talk. We walk outside. She says all of the things that you want to hear someone say about your EX when they've wronged you. He's an asshole, he's a liar, he is abusive, he isn't a man, he will never be loved because he is unlovable, he's filthy and disgusting..... Her words are sweet but they are no consolation to me, instead they make me feel as dirty as she's explaining to me that he is in her mind. If I was once with him, I must be all of those things too. (In the dream we are no longer together but living as roommates.)
I walk back into the house and from the corner of my eye I see a tall figure with dark hair standing in the Ex's room picking up the cushion of a chair (which had mold on it) and scooting the chair into place in the corner of the room. He picks up an old dirty plate with food caked on it and I hear the fork hit the plate. He never turns and shows me his face but he's in that dank, dirty room cleaning it up and moving things around-fixing things........ I walk down the hall and out the front door wiping tears from under my eyes and the dream ends.
I wake up and my heart is beating out of my chest. I am wide awake blinking my eyes in the dark trying to relive and remember all of the tiny details of this dream. I'm trying to decipher between the fantasy of the dream and the reality of what it could mean. I think about the beautiful colors in the dream, how motherly my mom was towards me, my blind brother flying a plane, my grandmother praising God....the pain of walking into that house and the smells I smelled-seeing his face. The hate and hurt that I felt being trapped between those four walls with him in that moment. What did it all mean. Did it mean anything at all? I haven't had a dream this vivid in years. Was there a story to be told. Should I pray about it and wait for God to help me understand or could it be one of those mysteries of life that never gets told. Was it void of meaning and I'm over thinking it?
We watched that movie Blue Valentine again this week. We had gone to see it at the theatre back when I was 12 weeks pregnant with Elle and it caused me much anxiety. I sat and cried for a long while after the credits rolled. Not a few cute tears, I'm talking snot down my face-loud-gross crying....It stayed with me and I thought about that movie for weeks afterwards. This idea that this young girl ends up adopting the same dysfunctional marriage that she grew up seeing her parents live and is in an emotionally damaging relationship....they start out so in love and their story is so unique and beautiful. It felt so real, which is why I couldn't stop thinking about it. (just rent the movie and you'll get what I'm saying.) The end is so heart wrenching and sad. It's like a roller coaster ride. You kind of feel like the happy parts and the uncomfortably sad parts are blows to the gut. It's happy and beautiful and hopeless and sweet all in this big mess of dysfunction, which sent me back to a time in my life when dysfunction was normal and peace was something I never knew how to experience- or wanted to experience. It's kind of like when people get addicted to the feeling of sadness. You created a warm, cozy bed of grief and you get comfortable in it and never want to come out. This movie felt like it was a trigger for me. Like a post traumatic stress trigger that brought me back to the past and resurfaced thoughts and emotions that I had healed from but were being hashed out again through this movie.
I felt like I needed to talk it out with Dustin and process this movie which set me off on a mild anxiety attack of the "what if's" of life, just as I had before in the movie theatre. BUT it's Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams, the girl crush of all girl crushes! How could you NOT watch it? I'm just obsessed with her on every level. I'd kind of love to chop my hair off one day to look just like her gorgeous blond short hair. Back to the anxiety attack after the movie. Dustin and I had that conversation about what our lives would have looked like had we never met and what we'd be doing. What if I had gotten knocked up with the EX's baby or what if I had married him instead of Dustin. The thought alone makes me shudder. The movie felt like a mirror of what my life could have looked like and imaging that puts me back to that dark time when that could certainly have been my reality.
It was a beautiful dream though, even though I woke up with the same feeling you feel after you have a nightmare. My brother was smiling and having so much fun flying that plane and we do dream of one day living in Texas, so that part of the dream was nice. Everything else just filled my heart with chaos.
If anything, the dream and that movie make me feel very grateful to be in the place that I am today.
*I wanted to turn off comments for this post just to get these words out of me without anything coming back in return.
