They say people dream every time they go into a certain stage of sleep, but I’ve never been sure how they’ve known something like that if even the people who are dreaming don’t know it. I’ve almost never remembered my dreams, with the exception of that one time last year I dreamt that raccoons invaded my building and only Jen was smart enough to keep them away from her computer with a decoy raccoon.

That was a funny dream, not in itself disturbing.

In the last couple of weeks though, I’ve been waking up suddenly in the night a lot, often from these tense awful dreams that make want to hide in my warm white bed and not face the hostile outside world. The guy I just split up with has shown up in a couple.

The worst one was the one where I dreamed we were just going to the movies like normal and it felt as though this whole thing had been just some horrible dream, because then I woke up and realized that we weren’t just going to the movies like normal and the normal part was the dream and the horrible dream part had actually happened.

I’m no dream expert, but I’m pretty sure that was indicative of my innermost desire for life to just go back to normal. Of course, it’s not that simple, that normal doesn’t really exist anymore, but try explaining that to a frustrated Id.

He also made an awkward appearance in one that mostly concerned with packing and/or unpacking these suitcases that were just too full, and having to choose which stuff to keep and which stuff not to keep. I remember debating particularly over a slightly trampy black skirt that I still have in real life; I’m not sure what I decided. Baggage seems like a pretty obvious metaphor.

Last night was the worst one yet. I went to bed feeling pretty happy about the world, but I had this whole awful dream where my mom came to visit and I didn’t have very much time to spend with her because I had all this work to do. She was staying in some hotel and I was staying with her and our whole extended family was apparently there too. I was lying in a bed with red sheets and I didn’t want to get up and I could hear her talking to a cousin of mine at the other end of the room, but I felt trapped in bed and I was totally isolated from them. Later, when Mom was leaving, I apologized for not spending more time with her and she said oh, that’s okay she didn’t mind, she had everyone else there, and I wound up sobbing on her shoulder.

I’m not doing justice to just how tense and disturbing these dreams were, how ill at ease I felt when I woke up. Do people who remember their dreams go through this torture-by-subconscious every day? Or is it just because a big part of my life has changed and everything still kind of feels in flux?