Nightmares

For the first time in a very long time I had a nightmare last night. I do dream a lot, but they are normally pretty interesting and not usually the stuff that makes me wake up in a sweat and panicking that I am about to die a gruesome and horrible death.

Last night was the sweaty, panicky, gruesome horrible death kind. A kind where I was with one of my best friends, trapped in a really old house, with cellars, many floors, lots of stair cases, attic rooms - cobwebs, dust, dark and dank, being chased or hunted down by something - I don't know who or what - I never saw a figure or a face - just could hear footsteps, breathing and in my dream had this deep deep sense of terror...I woke up at the point where we had reached the top floor of the house and a dead end, with no way of going any further...with just a choice to double back and risk being captured, or sitting tight and hiding....with the same risk.

And as I am writing this, I have the same feeling of discomfort and fear....I have goosebumps and a sense of being watched.

The mind is a wonderful, if not strange part of our being!

Weirdly, I don't understand where the dream/nightmare came from either. I don't watch horror films of any sort (I'm a big wuss!) and it wasn't as if I had had a particularly unpleasant day, or week, for that matter. Work has been busy, but good. Corin has been home most of the week. I got my new car on Thursday. I'm a week closer to James coming back home for good. And I am 4 weeks away from a long summer in Spain. Even the arrival of the new OFSTED inspection framework did not inspire panic or trepidation (thats for another time though!).

Is it odd though, that the person who was in my dream with me, by my side, dragging me along away from the source of my terror as best as they could, is one of my close friends, who, I found out this morning when I went into work, was in a horrific car accident last night, where their car was written off and both they and another driver were really very lucky to get out with just cuts and bruises. My friend didn't sleep well last night, replaying the whole accident in their mind, as anyone would. Makes me wonder whether it was coincidence that they were in my dream? (they are OK - and it was genuinely a freak accident - not speeding....flash flood on a dodgy stretch of the motorway that doesn't drain properly in rain....car then aquaplaned....they had no chance of controlling it....I'm just glad beyond belief that it was not my friend's time to go and that someone "up there" must have been watching over them)

My dreams/nightmares are usually pretty graphic and I do dream in colour. I remember my dreams pretty clearly most times - one of the things I keep promising to do is to keep a dream diary, but to be honest, I'd rather sleep than switch the light on to make notes about my nocturnal brain activity.

The picture was an accident as well - I was playing with the flashgun and took a really dreadful shot of me in the mirror, lit from under my chin with the flash. But as I started to radically tweak this picture emerged and it made me think that this is what I might have looked like in my dream if a light had fallen across my face whilst I was hiding from my tormentor.