Dream Demons

Last Saturday night I dreamed that The Real Deal was dead and they had me go identify the body.  It was very detailed and horrific.  I've been upset all week about it.

When I was young, in grade school, I dreamed that some teenagers came to our house and told my mother there was something wrong with this lantern light we had out on our lawn.  Once they got her out there, they hit her in the head with a hammer and killed her.  Then they came in the house and laid on the floor coloring in my coloring books.  I still remember every damn detail of that dream.  It really freaked me out.  It was the first thing I thought of when my mother had her aneurysm years later.

I have dreamed on two separate occasions about MW getting into a car accident and dying in front of me from horrifically severe head wounds.  He was driving my Explorer in both dreams.  No, I do not wish this to happen.  I was very upset by both dreams.

Speaking of bad dreams, everyone in our family has had at least one terrible dream in which Papoose #2 died in some traumatic way.  None of us told the others about the dreams until I finally had one that was SO bad, I literally could not function the next morning and finally had to talk to Mister Wonderful about it.  After I told him about my dream, he got this awful look on his face and admitted to having a bad bad dream about her too, one where she died.

In the dream that I had of her, the whole family was on vacation and we were on an outdoor balcony of a skyscraper.  There were alot of people milling around, and I looked down and she wasn't next to me. I looked around and saw her on a cement ledge by the edge of the building.  I started screaming and running towards her, trying to fight my way through the crowd to get to her before she fell.  I didn't make it.  I only got hold of her little shoe.  She was only a few years old when I had this dream.

Mister Wonderfuls bad dream about her had to do with her drowning.  Papoose #1 came to me one night when I was cooking dinner and said she needed to talk to me about a dream she had about her sister that had her very shook up.  She dreamed that her sister drowned while they were looking for seashells on the beach.  That a big wave came up behind her and pulled her under and she couldn't get to her in time to save her.  Neither MW or I had said a peep to Papoose #1 about our dreams.  Not one word.


When Papoose #2 was in the fourth grade, I was at work and answered the phone to a hysterical Papoose #1 crying and yelling into the phone about Papoose #2 falling and bleeding and convulsing.  They were both at the school.  Papoose #1 had a basketball game and Papoose #2 would always hang out at the school with her friends and watch her sister play.  The game had not yet started, and Papoose #1 had seen her sister sitting on a high railing outside of the gym and told her to get down before she hurt herself.  Not even 5 minutes later, someone is yelling for Papoose #1 to come outside, her sister was hurt.  Papoose #2 had been sitting on a railing that ran along a wheelchair ramp next to the stairs leading into the gym.  The ramp was 3-4 feet behind her back, the base of the stairs were about 10' or so in front of her.  She had hooked her feet behind the next bar down under the one she was sitting on, and in horsing around with her friends, lost her balance and fell head first onto the concrete.  Because her feet were hooked under that rail, she had no chance to catch herself or break her fall.  She crushed her skull in multiple places, crushed her eye socket, and suffered such a bad concussion that the ambulance that was called refused to treat her, and instead called in the careflight.  In waiting for the ambulance, then careflight, she convulsed repeatedly, and was bleeding out of her eyes, mouth and ears.  After I got the call, I made the trip from my office to the school, a drive that normally took me about 25 minutes, in about 7 minutes.

She was bad enough that the careflight people would not let me ride with her.  Papoose #1 and I made the trip to Cooks in record time again.  Everyone on the road gave way to our flashing headlights and let us pass, and the police officers we saw going through Boyd did not give chase.  We got to the emergency room and nobody had a positive thing to say to us.  Once moved to the ICU, completely unresponsive, we were told that her outlook did not look good.  Nobody had anything positive to tell us.  While waiting the long hours for something, ANYTHING to happen, I would receive calls from perfect strangers, saying they were praying for her, their family was praying for her, their church was praying for her.   After many days of nothing but nurses coming in to check on her and scan after scan, she finally started reacting to us.

She was in incredible pain, and was mean as a snake.  She seemed to hate me in a very special and energetic way.  She tried to flop out of the bed.  She pulled her iv's out until they finally put her little arms on these board things to stop her from hurting herself.  Little by little, she seemed to get a little better.  I got very good at avoiding her kicks and swinging arm boards when I had to put her on or off the bedpan.  Finally, she was well enough for a regular room, even if still not herself and still in incredible pain.  She was a stranger to me.  It was months before she would regain her personality.  But regain it she did.  Her neurosurgeon told us at her final visit that in all the years of his practicing, he had NEVER seen anyone with this kind of head injury regain motor skills the way she did, much less regain all of her sense of humor etc.  He actually had tears in his eyes when he hugged her goodbye that day.  Evidently, the part of her brain that was damaged, the part that the scans showed to be so damaged that even my untrained eye could see the defect, had something to do with her motor skills.  They didn't think she would ever tie her shoes or feed herself again.

The first basketball game that Papoose #1 had that Papoose #2 felt well enough to attend, we had dozens of people coming up to us asking if that was the girl who fell.  We had people from OUTSIDE of Texas that were there seeing family, that had been involved in praying for her when the doctors had almost given up on her.  It was touching to see them react to seeing her.  They all needed to hug her or touch her in some way.  It was surreal.


She is currently generally a straight A student in the 9th grade, taking every A/P class they have available to her.  She plays sports and is the most beastly long distance runner you will ever see.  Her sarcasm and quick wit are epic.

And to answer the unasked question, no, nightmares are not the only dreams I have.  As a matter of fact, I have had very very few truly bad nightmares in my life.  I dream alot, very vivid dreams usually, but rarely have nightmares.

I have heard, though, that fantastically vivid dreams are common in people who are insane.

Therapy?