martinzoo

Did you ever worry that your nightmares are trying to tell you something?

I am one of those people who dream a lot. They are the weirdest, and sometimes the most horrible of dreams. I have bad dreams several times per week and they really can affect my mood for several hours during the next day.

This week I have had two nightmares about the same subject: school shootings. My husband says that my dreams are my brain’s way of working through my fears. And this week I have had terrible reoccurring fears stemming from the Va. Tech shooting rampage. It seems like everywhere I go, I hear about it, or see it, or read about it. I can’t get away from it.

As if the current events were not bad enough, my usual escapes have been polluted with the subject also. When GB is at swim practice, I like to read a book. I love to read and this is one hour of no interruptions. My bookclub just finished reading “The Thirteenth Tale,” and I needed a new book to read. So I grabbed one of the books off of my reading pile, by Jodi Picoult. I have loved each one of her books, so I had not even read the book jacket when I bought this book. It’s called “Nineteen Minutes.”

About 20 pages into the book I start getting a niggling feeling. Then it was confirmed about 10 pages later that this book is indeed a story about a school shooting. Ugh! I put the book down…. I couldn’t read any more…. at that time.

That night I had my first nightmare. I dreamed that I was floating along beside a killer’s head, kind of like a bug. And I watched while he went from room to room shooting innocent young men and ladies. My dream even “borrowed” scenes from the book, which I didn’t need to see. One of the passages read:

John thought of Courtney Ignatio: how she’d been sitting across from him at the cafeteria table when the glass wall behind her burst; how suddenly there had been a flower blooming in the middle of her chest, bright as a poppy. He thought of how a hundred screams, all at once, had braided into a rope of sound. He remembered teachers poking their heads out of classrooms like gophers, and the looks on their faces when they heard the shots.

And this scene was in my dream….. vividly. I have been drawn to this book, even though I don’t really want to read it, but I can’t get it out of my head. I want to know the kid’s motivation. And so far, the motivation that I’m getting is that he was bullied (this is one of my huge issues with public school) from the time he was in Kindergarten.

Then last night I watched Wednesday’s episode of “Medium.” A couple of weeks ago (before the Tech shooting), Allison’s husband was involved in an incident at work where a disgruntled employee came in with a gun and held key employees hostage and shot a couple of them. In this episode Allison’s husband is having flashbacks (which they decided not to show because of the Tech shooting) and having a hard time coming to terms with the fact that we really don’t have as much control over our lives as we like to think. At one point he tells Allison that you get through your life based on certain assumptions, such as the fact that nobody will come to your work or school with a gun and shoot innocent people. And now it’s very hard to come to terms with the fact that that may not be necessarily true. But I don’t want to come to those terms. I don’t even want to worry about that. My Scarlett O’Hara mentality tells me to “worry about that another day.”

And yet obviously my brain IS worried, because I had another nightmare last night. Aquagirl is at JMU and Jabem will be at VCU this coming Fall. In my dream I was at VCU with Jabem, don’t ask me why, and shots were being fired. Students were running chaotically in every direction and yet we were frozen. I kept telling Jabem that we needed to get out of the building, but he wouldn’t run. Then the shooter came in and was going to shoot Jabem…..I jumped in front of Jabem and got shot in the back. Jabem caught me and was holding me, and at the end of the dream he says, “What did you go and do that for?”

I’m not sure what to make of it, except how I feel. I feel terrible sadness, even though it didn’t really happen. And I feel worry for my kids. That is what I feel.

I want my Scarlett O’Hara mentality.

I hate my dreams………