Worst...Night...Ever...

What is the worst nightmare you’ve ever had???


I’ve always had a great relationship with sleep, we get along really well – I’m generally not the type of person who has difficulty in falling asleep quickly or with staying asleep once I’m out, but last night…


Wow. I think I had the second worst nightmare I’ve dreamt in the 40+ years that I’ve been a professional sleeper.


The absolute worst nightmare I’ve ever had occurred about eleven years ago, when our son Ethan was still an infant. He was at the crawling and climbing stage, walking but not really comfortably yet. And in that dream…


…I have Ethan – his tiny little infant body, held precariously in my left arm – as I’m climbing a structure that reminds me of the Watson/Crick DNA model I learned about in seventh grade, the double helix that’s like a ladder. The room – but it isn’t a room, not exactly – rather, the space I’m in is all black, black background with no form or shape, and I’m climbing very slowly up this ladder-like model one hand-hold at a time.


And as I get to the top, I’m relieved because I’ve made it, though who knows why I’ve been climbing…and then it happens, Ethans wiggles as I’m trying to hold him, and he topples from my arms, off the top of the ladder-thing, and I snatch at him to try and stop him from falling but he goes falling down and I realize I’ve failed as his body slips away from me…


…and I wake up. Didn’t really get much sleep that night at all, I’m afraid.


But last night’s was almost as bad,…


…because it’s Ethan again, only this time the 12 year old Ethan. We’re all (I’m not sure who ‘all’ is) in a basement, concrete walls, damp feel, dank smell, and the lighting is creeping me out, because it’s fluorescent but there aren’t any fluorescent lights overhead, the light source is coming from somewhere unseen…


But we’re all searching just the same, it’s like a scene from a t.v. show – wandering down long tunnels, and two girls are in trouble and we don’t know if we’ll get to them in time. I think they’ve been kidnapped but I’m not sure…


And then someone yells out that they’ve found ‘the door’, and sure enough, as we all rush over, Ethan pushes through to the front of the crowd and opens the passage, a twenty inch door that he steps through. He goes in because he has the cutting tool, a thing made of plexiglass but shaped like a ray gun you might see in a ‘B’ sci-fi movie.


So he’s through the first door, in a small passage that is barred by a second door to the right. It’s this second door he’s going to use the gun on, and he holds it up, waits for a second for it to charge, and I see, from where I’m standing outside the room, that as the ray gun goes off, it lights Ethan’s face up like he’s watching an atomic bomb go off in the distance. There’s no explosion, the gun just sort of melts the door away…


And I rush through the two doorways. But the two girls that I thought would be there aren’t. Instead, the sense of dread crashes on me like a tsunami as I see a large pile of leaves and sticks with a red phone cord coming out of it, leading to a red phone on the ground in front of me. I pick up the receiver and listen.


There’s a tremendous amount of static in the background, but it’s a recorded message that plays over and over, with the voice of the older of the two girls saying very matter of factly (though I can barely hear her), “Better hurry up…time’s running out…”


And I suddenly know what to do…I drop the phone to the ground, climb over it, and begin digging through the pile of leaves where I realize the two girls are buried…and a second later, a hand comes reaching from the ground, and I try to pull her out…
…and I wake up.


At this point, it was around 2:30 in the morning, I think. With the dread I was feeling, I couldn’t let myself fall back into the dream, because I couldn’t stand the thought of going back to that. And then I heard a loud ‘thump!’ from downstairs? the basement? outside on the deck? I wasn’t sure, and I ended up getting out of bed checking every door and every room in our house, but nothing was there.


Then, about ten minutes later, Gillian woke up for the first time. I say first, but truthfully, after I finally got her back into bed I don’t think she ever really did get back to sleep until the morning. At one point, Lissa got up with her, tried to get her to calm down, and then brought her into bed with us. This lasted about fifteen minutes, I think; I can only take a foot being stuck into my back so many times before I start to get a little testy…

But as I'm writing all this down I'm wondering about the significance of the two dreams. Specifically, why are my two worst nightmares involving my oldest son? Is there any thread, any relationship between the two dreams other than him? And for any of you reading this who are interested in the whole dream interpretation thing (and I know a couple of you are) what's the significance of the pieces I remember?

(Um, is there something really wrong with me???)