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| Image credit: Photo by Joe Thorn on Flickr Licensed under Creative Commons |
When I have nightmares, my subconscious doesn't like to get imaginative. There are no weird surrealist scenes. There are no horror movie serial killers. There are no dank and mouldering castles. It likes to stick with what it knows: my children in danger or my husband having an affair. And it depicts both of these themes with vivid, lifelike realism. So much so that I'll wake up the next morning wanting to hug my kids or punch my husband or both.
A few nights ago I dreamt that Mark and I were trying to have a conversation, and (like so many of our conversations in real life) we were continually interrupted. We moved from room to room as he uneasily looked for a space in which he could evade my questions in privacy. In bits and pieces, trying to keep my calm in front of the people who passed in and out of the rooms, I learned that he had a child outside our marriage. The mothers name was Lorena and the child, Diego.
Upon waking, my mind wavered temporarily in a transitional state where the dream, and the knowledge that it had been a dream, were both simultaneously real. I calculated when the dream child would have conceived, and was upset to find that it would have been after he began recovery, around the time I ended my own pregnancy. I fretted over what it meant that the mother and child had names. Before Mark's disclosure of sex addiction, I so often had nightmares of his infidelity that I always fear my mind discovering a hidden truth in sleep.
I lay in bed tense and angry, until the dream slowly started to slip away and I realized I was getting upset at my husband for details my mind created. But then again, that probably happens more often than I'm willing to acknowledge.
I wish my subconscious would stick to making jokes.
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