End of the Year Dreams

A new year is coming and I’m not entirely happy to end this one and greet another. Where did 2015 go? And the years before that? The days, weeks and months seem to fly by the older I get with me not accomplishing much of anything since becoming a widow. It’s not that I don’t set goals for myself, I do. But they don’t stretch and test me. They don’t make me a better person or give me a sense of purpose. What’s worse I’m not even sure it matters anymore if I drift through my self-indulging days with no structure coming from outside myself. That sounds like I’m suggesting I should want a job or a volunteer position, doesn’t it. Been there, done that and I could make a quilt with the t-shirts. Nope, those doors are closed and no matter how much nagging I might hear inside my head, I’m not opening them again. 

The past few weeks I’m been having trouble sleeping through the night again. I’ll fall asleep around midnight then between four and five dreams-on-steroids wake me up. They are a mixture of my daytime dilemmas and bizarre images that won’t let me fall back to sleep again. This morning’s dream was of my mom with a heavy chain wrapped around her leg that she could have easily removed. She was kneeling next to a brick building on a narrow brick street lined with shoulder-to-shoulder brick buildings as far as the eye could see. The bricks were striking in their pastel buff color. Clean, unadorned and orderly. Dreaming of bricks, according to the dream dictionary, represents one of two things: individual ideas stacking up or putting up a wall to protect or isolate yourself. And dreaming of being chained signifies a need to break free from something---a routine, a relationship, whatever is holding you back. In the dream I asked my mom what she was doing there and all she said before I woke up is, "I have to stay here.” The dream dictionary says that mothers in dreams represent “…the nurturing aspect of your own character. Mothers offer shelter, comfort, life, guidance and protection.” Doctor Freud, help me! Am I my mother in my dream? Is the brick alley of possibilities my prison or my fort?

Dreams are fascinating and dream dictionaries even more so. It might be physio-babble to assign meanings to bricks, chains, mothers, etc., but the fact that someone took the time to write down explanations for just about every object, action and relationship you can name is mind boggling in itself. The fact that the dream dictionary can make sense out of bizarre dreams and give you an ‘aha moments’ keeps me going back. 

What’s causing my recent dream episodes? I’ve got it narrowed down to two possibilities---or maybe a combination of both. One: my healthy eating from last spring, summer and fall was replaced with a diet with way too many sweets, typical of what happens to me this time of the year. Call it comfort food eating or lack of self-control, the end result is the same. I gained five pounds between Thanksgiving and Christmas. They say that sugar triggers responses in the same pleasure part of the brain as cocaine does. We crave what gives us pleasure. There’s no doubt about the fact that cocaine is addictive but the jury is still out on whether or not sugar has some of the same addictive qualities to a lesser degree. Yadda, yadda, yadda. I’ve used that excuse before.

The other factor that might be making my dreams so intense lately could be the fast approaching sadiversary of Don’s passing in the middle of January. Try all you want to avoid doing it, but I bet most widows use that date on the calendar to assess their lives---what we’ve been through and where we still need to go. The fact that my dreams-on-steroids come paired with night-sweats, I’m leaning towards the cause being mostly diet/body chemistry related. Guess what that means. Yes, kicking the sugar habit---again---will be on my list of New Year’s Resolutions. But only after I toast 2016 in with hard root beer poured over vanilla ice cream. I just discovered that combination recently so it should be easy to give up. Only three bottles left in the six-pack and I never have to buy it again. 

Actually, the last few years I’ve replaced my life-long habit of writing New Year’s Resolutions with naming a single mantra for the coming year. For 2015 my mantra was, “Hoe the row you’ve already got and don’t go off looking for new seeds to plant.” It meant that I’d been trying too hard to find new friends/relationships in my widowhood and I needed, instead, to nurture the ones already in my life. My success with that mantra was mixed. The desperate search mode I’d been in since Don died all but disappeared from my life this past year but I could have done a better job of nurturing my old relationships. A few more phone calls to family and old friends, a few more invitations to go out to lunch coulda, shoulda been forth coming on my part. I still need to work on that. 

“I was looking for a new mantra for 2016 when ran across this suggestion: “Inhale the good shit, exhale the bull shit.” I’m pretty good at doing that already so I’ll pass that one up, but as a potential mantra it made me laugh out loud. I’m still looking and I’ll let you know when I find one. ©