Nightmares are a sign of motion.
Nightmares are a sign of healing.
Nightmares are a sign that my inner mind is working as hard as my outer mind wants it to.
Nightmares are a sign that I'm changing, which is a sign that I'm growing, which is a sign that I'm learning, which is what I want the very most from my life.
This could be called cyclical reassurance.
I keep telling myself things, knowing that there is always a pressure point where they will become truth within me.
I had a nightmare Saturday night. I fell asleep with semi-familiar worries in my head, and woke up just before dawn, panicked and searching the room for some small colour out of tune with the dream.
The comfortor was charcoal grey like it always is, and I clutched and kneaded one corner of it, remembering the white satiny one from the nightmare bed.
One a size larger than cfoo's, where we lay curled up in everyone's warmth that one summer so many years ago.
And then the dream came tumbling back at me, banshee screech tearing at my sinuses, and I sat there shaking in horror.
There was no violence in the dream.
There was no running, no monsters, no cobwebs or beasts or falling.
There was just a possible future that has been on my mind recently, and it going horribly wrong due to my own weakness, due to personal failings.
And I couldn't say it aloud, couldn't repeat it to myself. I couldn't close my eyes again for fear it would come back and I couldn't do anything to assuage it.
Because it was true. Or possible, at least. Because it was something that happens all too often, that even media-shy monstres read about at least once a year in the newspapers.
I couldn't think. A headcold was encroaching on my body and my brain was sitting in a fever-cooked shell paralyzed, broken, unlike it has ever been.
Weak, afraid. Something which monstres are neither.
And slowly Mr. Pyke pulled it from me, as I sat there afraid to open my eyes and look at anything, forcing my jaw to move, forcing breath to pass through my throat, to make sounds, that in my mind were distinct words held separate, lest I realize what I was saying.
And I told him something so painfully intimate that I hadn't been able to say it out loud to myself yet, and I shook and I listened to my own words and then I curled up as close as I could to him and cried tears that I didn't know I was able to cry.
Lying there, with my face pressed against the wash-worn terrycloth of his bathrobe, I was so thankful. For every time I let my stressed irritation get the better of me, I realized suddenly the important bits.
And I cried into his hip-bone and realized I had somewhere to cry.
And the dream isn't resolved, but maybe the fact that my brain is ready to consider those possibilities is a sign that my own sense of responsibility might grow enough to encompass it.
I realize I'm being vague, but I'm not sure how to explain it.
Part of the nightmare had to do with the sudden onslaught of work, with the incredible responsibility that I've been handed, with the amount of competition that I am surrounded by. There was nothing work-related in the dream, but it was all about responsibility, and that is something I have had weighing heavily on my lately -- so that I may learn to carry it.
Because that's all it takes. Adjustment time, and the brain power dedicated to learning to understand.
Much of which I apparently did in my sleep this weekend, with a heavy portion of help from someone with more strength than I've given humans credit for.
And the nap he tricked me into on Sunday?
I dreamed continuations of that dream, but it was slightly less horrible, and tonight, it might almost not be horrible at all.
Resiliance is the only thing I'm good at.