Whenever I hear someone say "I can't remember my dreams," I want to pop them.
I unfortunately live with two such people who can not understand how I can wake from a full night's sleep exhausted. Is this the price all we once "imaginative children" must pay?
In my waking hours I love playing on paper with the characters I've consciously created. There is no greater feeling as a writer than when your characters start writing their own dialogue, when you can hear the meter and nuance of their speech as you type. The first couple of times it happened I felt absolute affirmation.
Now I wonder if it is, perhaps, the other side of a bizarre coin that offers imagination overdrive.
It's real characters in unreal situations that drop into my dreams. Not nightly, not weekly, not even monthly. But when they do it's enough to make me fear the night.
I wish it was as simple as zombies, missed tests or falling off of a cliff. Instead it's people who have actually hurt me returning in spades.
I can vanquish them to an approrpriate box during the day only to have them roar to life in my sleep where my work, my family and my friends aren't there to shield me.
Last night I woke with my teeth chattering and gooseflesh in a warm bed, my pillow soaked with tears. My conscious self recognized immediately that my dream captor and tormentor is 1,000 miles away and immediately sets about scheming to find ways to fix the relationship.
That same mind knows there is nothing I can do.
She rejected me, rejected my family. She wants nothing to do with us.
But my subconscious will not let her go.


Copyright 2004 Judi Griggs