Grantblings

The Catastrophe Dreams

For about four months or so now I’ve been having what I’ve come to call Catastrophe Dreams. They have been reoccurring with enough regularity that I’ve noticed that they have actually been reoccurring. If that makes any sense.

They have all been different, but they all start out the same, preparing for an impending catastrophe. This part of the dream finds me in a rushed stated preparing, best I can, for the trouble headed my way. I’m always with other people who are also helping prepare, but they are never people I know from my real life. Just sort of those nameless, faceless people that inhabit our dreams.

The first catastrophe dream I can remember found me on a cruise ship. The impeding catastrophe was that there were a large group of soldiers or pirates (but modern pirates with guns, not Yo Ho Ho type) were heading towards the ship with the intention to board it. Some of the passengers, and myself, were busily trying to hide valuables and ourselves to avoid detection from the marauders.

The second catastrophe dream had me in Burlingame in the area of my parents house and there was an impending flood. In real life, there is a small creek that runs near my parents house. When I say small, I mean it, this thing has no water in it at all. In my dream, however, it was going to flood big time. The big, sweep away houses, type of flooding. So me and other nearby residents were frantically filling sandbags and preparing for the oncoming deluge. The oncoming catastrophe.

Now in both of the above dreams, there was an odd similarity in that during the whole dream, my mouth was filled with bright pink bubble gum. So much gum, in fact, that I cannot talk. In my dream I try to pull out gobs off the stuff but it just pulls and snaps like old gum does. I never can get enough out of my mouth to be able to talk which makes things difficult to prepare for a catastrophe with other people.

Going to go on a side track here…the mouthful of gum thing has been in many more dreams than the catastrophe dreams, but all happening in the past few months. When the gum thing had happened enough times that I realized it was a reoccuring dream I did what you do in those cases, look it up on google. So I began typing and….

Holy cow! Enough other people have had the same dream it comes up in a Google auto-fill! (Oh, those poor cockroaches people.) So looking up the gum dream on several site it means basically this: You have something you want to say but you can’t say it. Them most of the sites added that it could be a sign of sleep apnea or a closed airway making it hard for you to breathe. Not what a hypochondriac wants to read at all.

So in the two catastrophe dreams above, I had my mouth full of gum when the catastrophe happens. But this is where my catastrophe dreams get weird…the catastrophe happens in a second. The soldiers/pirates, the flood…blip…it’s over. No big panic or terror at stomping feet or rising waters, just instantly my dream jumps to after the catastrophe.

There I am, with other survivors and we begin the dealing with the aftermath: cleaning up, helping the injured. It’s over. I’ve survived. We’ve survived.

This morning I had another catastrophe dream. This one was different from the other two in that my mouth wasn’t full of gum. I could talk as I prepared for the disaster. I’d already said what I couldn’t say before. In this dream the catastrophe was an impending invasion of some sort of creature. Zombies, aliens, I don’t know, but me and the other ‘dream residents’ knew they were on the way and we were locking doors, boarding up windows, preparing to hide until they were past.

Blink. They are gone, disaster is over.

Me and the other survivors all come out of hiding and begin the cleanup and dealing with the aftermath.

So, these are the catastrophe dreams.

I’m thinking it’s my brain telling me that whatever turmoil is going on in my life, I’m going to be okay and the part that is the ‘catastrophe’ will seem like a blip. Then I can look to rebuild.

Hey, rebuild, that was one of my words for the year.

Anybody got any gum?