Recently I read an article on Cracked.com that was entitled 5 Warning Signs That You’re Finally Getting Older. It gave me a chuckle, particularly because I agreed with most of it. I guess that means I’m getting old. Crap.
Anyway, as happenstance would have it, that night I had an unusually difficult time sleeping because I was being plagued by nightmares. More than once I woke up in a cold sweat. But when I was finally up in the morning it occurred to me that the dreams I’d been having weren’t the kind that one thinks of upon hearing the word “nightmare”, and I thought to myself “here’s another example of something that changes as you get older”. So let’s have a comparison, shall we?
When I was younger I had nightmares about……monsters. Whether it was enormous, rabid dogs, or poltergeists, or zombies, some of my most prominent nightmares involved running from vicious, evil creatures that wanted to eat me.
A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…my daughter running into heavy traffic. For some reason we were walking alongside a busy highway and she let go of my hand and took off into the road. I ran after her, but (illogically) my 29-year-old legs only seemed to be able to move half as fast as her 2-year-old ones, and I barely managed to grab the back of her shirt and send us both hurtling into the ditch before a semi truck struck us both.
When I was younger I had nightmares about…
…weird, creepy things happening to the people around me, like when I dreamed that my aunt Judy’s teeth all began falling out of her head as she was talking to me, or when I dreamed that my mother kept randomly chasing me with a butcher knife and screaming like a maniac.
A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…my husband suddenly acting as though he’d never met me. We were hanging around our friends and family, but he completely ignored me and treated me like I was a complete stranger.
When I was younger I had nightmares about…
…my friends and classmates and I engaging in war-like battles with tons of gunfire and explosions and people dying all around me. (Now that I’m writing it, this one sounds awfully intense for a kid…is that weird?)
A few nights ago I had a nightmare about…
…missing my plane home from out West. I dreamed that somehow I had forgotten that it was my day to go home and I hadn’t packed. I was in someone’s house rather than camp, and I was running all over it trying to find all my stuff and pack quickly. My coworkers left and I missed the bus, and I spent the rest of the dream desperately trying to track down another bus or a taxi or something that knew the route through the oil sand access roads to the Albian air strip.
The nightmares I had when I was younger filled me with dread, made me sweat right through my pajamas and my blankets, and usually ended in me waking up in a panic, unsure if it had actually happened or not. The nightmares I had a few nights ago elicited the exact same reactions. I woke up from my daughter running into traffic with my heart pounding so fast I thought I might be having a heart attack. The dream in which my husband ignored me found me awake with a pain in my chest, feeling like I might throw up. And the missed-bus dream had me waking up in a cold sweat, wondering how I was going to get home. The whole thing represents a shift in priorities, it would seem – which is completely logical when you think about it. It’s also pretty funny though. I’ve gone from dreaming about monsters and teeth falling out and vicious battles, to protecting my daughter, losing my husband, and trying to catch a taxi. And the shift has not changed my reactions in the slightest.
I guess I must be getting older after all. Bugger. 🙂
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