Nightmares

Psychological theorists speculate that dreams deal with concerns that we are incapable of handling during the course of the day. El Hombre recently told me that dreams are how we deal with the anxieties in our daily lives that we don't/can't deal with while awake.

My sleep has always been saturated with dreams. Growing up, I very often talked, or rather screamed, in my dreams. The most common phrases I scream in my sleep are: "NOOOOOO!", "STOOOOOOP!!", "Hajima!" (don't do that!). I rarely remember my dreams but the few times I've been woken up and recalled the context of the dream, it's usually someone who is bothering me or doing something I don't think they should do. My analysis, which has no basis in science or psychology, is that my dreams are where I deal with the things in my day-to-day life over which I feel I have no control.

When my life is easygoing with no worries, I don't talk in my sleep at all. During the several months I was traveling around the world with my only concerns to see as much of the current locale and eat every delicious thing possible, I very rarely talked in my sleep and to the extent I did, the talking was limited to quiet murmurs.

My pobrecita roommate told me that ever since...well, in the last month or so, I've been talking and screaming in my sleep every night. Loud, complete sentences. Punctuated screams at the top of my lungs. Usually when I scream I end up waking myself up.

Most of the time my dreams are convoluted and make no sense and it's hard to really take any meaning from them except as a compilation of all the random thoughts, scenes, senses, sights that I've had in the last few days, thrown together in to the black hole that is my mind and spewed out in a non-sensical stream. But these days it's very easy to analyze my dreams because, well, they are basically a mirror of the things I'm concerned about while I'm awake. Asleep or awake there is no escape from my current concerns.

Except that there is a slight reprieve, I've recently discovered, when 1) El Hombre sleeps next to me and 2) when I sleep at home (my family's home). Meaning, the screaming in my sleep ceases. In both cases, I think there is a sense of comfort, safety. Which falls in line with what I think about the current situation: the global financial crisis is stressing the hell out of me, but I firmly believe that as long as I am surrounded by my loved ones I'll be fine.