In Lucid Dreams

Piecing together the emotional imprints left by semi-conscious dreams.

Sometimes I need to lie in bed and let the lucid dreams wash over me. Gliding from one storyline to another. Inside houses I’ve never seen, with people I’ve never met, in places I’ve never been.

The P.I.C. (partner in crime) peppers me with questions as soon as I’m awake. “Is your drink good?” “Do you still want the chicken in the microwave?” He sees me typing, but interrupts anyway because I’ve slept all day, and it bothers him. He has trouble sleeping past six, so 1:30 in the afternoon is unfathomable. That’s fair, but sometimes sleeping is the only thing that wipes my slate clean. Resets me from all I’ve taken on.

Do I have to undergo hormone replacement therapy to lose weight at this stage in life? For my face not to be as round as the moon? Do I have Cushing Syndrome? Will the methods I’ve used before fail me because I’m too far gone and now live inside perimenopause, where fat clings to bellies and all motivation leaves?

I have to make time for self-care I never needed before. Pre-plantar fasciitis and psoriasis and endometriosis. When I didn’t know I was a highly sensitive person, I could just go, go, go—working overstimulating jobs, bearing the stress, ignoring my body because I didn’t know it yet. Not in the way I do now, processing the effect of every subtle energy dynamic in conversation, feeling what’s going in, what I’ll absorb, what will hurt or set me back. I’ve made my home into an introvert’s oasis. A den to unplug, play records, stack up potted succulents and commune with cats. This is where I recover from being a part of the world.

In lucid dreams, I make sense of things that can’t be solved on the physical plane. I was just in a house with windows bigger than anything I’ve ever witnessed in the broke writer’s life I live now. The man of the house was a giant, a real Zeus, and commanded me to draw back the carpet-thick, massive curtains and open the windows wide. They looked out over a courtyard, or the water, or both—the dream danced a duality of views at once. And then I was by a harbor. My friend was on a boat with a lighthouse in the background, like New England, serene, idyllic, and her voice was disembodied, but I felt her there, talking like we do in the day-to-day, connected, even when we don’t see each other. My setting shifted without me even knowing it, and now I was looking out over the harbor from a jarringly stucco parking lot in what felt like an abandoned strip mall cast in putrid yellow light. A framed public service announcement with a picture of various kinds of drug paraphernalia (a pipe, needles, foil) read: These things are needed for molestation to occur. Except none of those things are needed for molestation to occur. So they wouldn’t find anyone, no one would be held accountable, because molesters would molest with or without those things. That sign was a regulatory agency holding its hands up, removing itself from the responsibility of arresting culprits. Allowing atrocity to continue, unhindered. I scanned the barren courtyard inside the strip mall filled with empty tables and beyond—the Goodwill I now apparently worked at, which also contained a spy ring requiring many outfits for incognito missions like in The Americans.

I’m still horizontal. Head back on pillows, neck hurting—the muscles on my right side have been perpetually clenched as of late. I’m still wondering if a diet of sweet potatoes, smoothies and fresh fruit with the occasional avocado is what’s needed to make any dent at all in my bulbous belly that seems impervious to the wild yam cream I rub inside my thighs and anti-bloating powder I shake in a blender bottle and knock back with a vitamin C packet once a day. So many things have to go. They must drop and fall away for me to have the energy to keep doing this. Maybe I can sleep my way through the resistance.

But we’re having pasta for breakfast and I need to drill holes in 20 pots outside so I can clear the patio and pick weeds and push my aching feet a little farther. Maybe I will stay in bed a little longer, finish that book, shower wastefully—extra steamy and slow, with utter disregard for the water bill. Maybe life is holding possibilities the stress has blinded. And everything’s waiting on the other side of how I’ve been going about it. Maybe I will write 10 books and not have to worry about money anymore, like a medium once foretold. Maybe, in ways, it will get easier.

Can I have more Joy, now?

Will I survive the boredom of doing the right things?

Will success, and happiness, be enough?

If only lucid dreams told me anything that makes sense. But it’s like skipping from one movie plot to another, just as you make it past the first 30 minutes. I’m left with a million imprints of feelings that all I can do is sit with, and revisit and try to carry into this hard world, where everything’s so linear. Or is it? Maybe Zeus, who seemed to have the power in the household, was passing it to me—to pull back the veil and really look at the ever-changing nature of things. The ever-present duality. Multiple possibilities existing at once. Pull back the curtains, he pointed, and see.

SelfLove Lately?

Your turn. What does self-love look like to you right now, in this unprecedented moment? (LMK in the comments.)

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