Waking up from a bad dream

I don't seem to remember my dreams often any more, but when I do, I always seem to think about them until some "message" can be found in them. Right before I woke up this morning, I had a freakish, nonsensical, unpleasant dream. I don't remember much of the content, thank goodness, only that it started out fairly ordinary, and got progressively more weird and unpleasant until I could no longer stand it.

Here's the part I do remember. Demetrius and the kids had somewhere to go in the late afternoon, and I had decided I was going to lie down for a bit. I woke up several hours later as they were coming home, as were all sorts of people and animals and creatures, who were *definitely* not invited and were most unpleasant in their behavior. And I found the whole thing pretty disorienting because I had just woken up and I couldn't seem to find my glasses.

At some point I realized that this was a dream, and that I most definitely wanted out of it. I thought of what Daughter in Ohio told me years ago about how, when she found herself in a bad dream, she would just shake her head, and that woke her up.

Tried it.
Nope, didn't work.

Finally it occurred to me to look upon this unpleasant scene with its frightful beasts and proclaim "You are not real!" The scene started to fade. I said it again. "You are not real!" That did the trick--the whole disturbing scene just dissolved.

Thinking about the sequence of the dream--the fact that it started out with things pretty much okay and devolved into something completely unbearable...well, it's not hard for me to see a parallel between that and the last 5 years. I'm not suggesting that it's all just a dream, and that if we just shout at it, it will oblige and go away. But maybe some of it isn't real. At least, the more I think of it as "reality", the more defeated I begin to feel, making it harder to work for change.

Maybe I've found a mantra here. Obviously, I can't change anything by just saying to the Bush administration and all of its little wizards "You are not real!" I have to keep doing other stuff too. But maybe there's something powerful in asserting, out loud, that I refuse to have their vision of reality have power over me.

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