Tuesday, September 3, 2013

You have no power over me!

I don’t know if I have confessed this on the blog before, but I’m one of those people who can have three or four dreams a night and remember them. The great part about that is that some of them stick with you for the rest of the day. Can we say story fodder?

My favorite story regarding that was when I dreamt that one of my best friends had turned into a vampire and I had to stake him with a No. 2 pencil. Of course the next day, I felt the need to apologize for it because I felt guilty.

I’m sure that some of you have had that happen before.

Now, I know that I have not confessed this on the blog. We are expecting a Baby Arista in November. Both of us are happy and healthy and right on track, but being a writer of the things that go bump in the night, this has been a tremedously interesting experience. Mostly in that I was convinced that I had a xenomorph growing inside me until the sonogram (go back to last month's post about being a visual person).

But back to the dreams. Anxiety dreams are supposedly common in pregnant women. I mean, your whole life is changing, first baby or fourth, and your brain is dealing with it. But anxiety dreams for a person who eats and breathes horror movies and shapeshifters, has manifested into the weirdest, most vivid dreams on the planet. We are talking full-blown, waking with a jump, heart-pounding dreams that stay with me for the rest of the day. Alligators, Zombies, and Kaiju (Pacific Rim) have been the most frequent subjects.

I'm not going to lie and say I am taking them in stride. Now, when I wake up at 4 in the morning to go to the bathroom, again, I usually can't fall right back to sleep. No matter how much I convince myself there is not a woman in the closet who wants to eat my toes.

A writer friend of mine said I needed to take my subconscious and make it work for me. Take some of those crazy dreams and get them on the page. Because they are just dreams. So that's what I'm spending my month doing, getting the drama on the page. Making all these crazy dreams work for me, instead of me being a slave to them.

Don't be surprised if the next story has a few more scary parts in it that normal. I've finally got the demon fodder I needed to flush out the next project.

So to badly quote one of my favorite movies: You have no power over me, Silly Anxiety dreams!

And if you've got any weird dreams that have stuck with you, I'd love to hear them. Make me feel a little better at night knowing I'm in very good company.

--------
Amanda Arista
Author, Diaries of an Urban Panther series
www.amandaarista.com

6 comments:

Jessica @ a GREAT read said...

Heehee! Love the title of this post!

I can rarely remember my dreams honestly. Although, some mornings I wake up remembering them somewhat, only to forget them later on in the day! Usually they are totally weird, and I'm like what the heck was my brain on last night?!

Funny thing was, that my most current dream that I remembered involved going back to high school for some odd reason. Even though in my dream I knew I was done with high school yet there were classes I had to take for some reason. But I couldn't quite find my class because it was in a section of the building I've never been to. It was "new."

Then later that day--back in the waking real world--I drove by my high school while running errands and I saw that they were adding on a new section to the high school! Weird, right?!

Amanda Arista said...

Whoa- you need to open a hotline there Jessica!

My high school dream is usually they are making me retake a high school class and I'm always like "But i have a college degree"

But they never listen.

Helen Lowe said...

Great post, Amanda -- maybe it's a writer thing but I find I often have surround-sound vivid dreams, in technicolor too! And sometimes, very rarely, can actually 'change the outcome' in the dream, which is kind of cool!

Helen Lowe said...

Oh--how could I forget to say: CONGRATULATIONS on the forthcoming arrival of Baby Arista, that is just wonderful news!

June M. said...

Before I forget to say it, Congrats on Baby Arista!!! May you both have a very easy labor/delivery :)

I rarely remember my dreams, and when I do they are generally fairly stupid, LOL. For example, last week I dreamed my dog was trying to tell me something, and I was guessing what she wanted to eat and she was either jumping up and down for yes or shaking her head no. Finally, she got upset that I did not understand her and just started talking to me (which didn't seem to surprise me much, LOL). Like I said, stupid dreams :)

Cylver said...

Hopefully some of the dreams you remember are pleasant ones. I had two nightmares last night. In one I dreamed a family member had died and I woke up crying. Horrible! Fortunately most of my dreams are just the run-of-the-mill mundane type - I dream I'm at work dealing with annoying customers, etc...