Does The Enchilada I Had Before Bedtime Have Anything To Do With This?

Another strange dream last night: I seemed to have an out of body experience while I was dreaming. I was in two places at once, watching myself act out the things I was writing down in a short story. During the dream, I suddenly woke up in a big white bed in a bedroom that looked like something out of those hipster catalogs (that yuppies always buy from and congratulate each other when they agree on some plastic table made in Sweden that they both thought was useful and some inane expression of postmodern crappy art) with white sheets, black furniture and eggshell paint on the walls. I could see a colorful outdoor scene through the large picture window overlooking the side yard of the house (the window was so large that the world beyond looked like one of those cheesy full wall wallpapers you could buy 25 years ago at home improvement stores. You could order any number of tropical scenes, woodland scenes, and winter wonderland views. The sight out my window looked so fake and so larger than life that I almost wondered if I could peel it off the wall!). It was a misty fall morning and there was a thin layer of fog in the air. But the oak trees on the property were turning their seasonal colors and dropping their leaves all over the green grass. The vivid colors were in stark and strange contrast to the crisp whiteness of the room.

For some reason, I woke up in the dream frightened and sure that something bad had happened but I couldn’t quite remember what. My memory was terribly foggy and only an impression remained that I had of a bad accident or tragedy that occurred recently. The memory sat somewhere in my mind’s peripheral vision- just off center- and I struggled to remember what occurred. I rolled over and went to touch my husband, seeing him sleeping soundly albeit with a scowl on his face. I reached out to smooth his wrinkled forehead but I found myself stopping just short of touching him. I suddenly remembered we were fighting about something- what it was, again I couldn’t recall- and he was in the middle of giving me the silent treatment for a few days so I turned my back to him and sighed. I then immediately remembered the newborn across the hall. I listened for her light sounds from the baby monitor before relaxing again. Everyone was still asleep and all was well, or good enough for the moment, so I drifted back into sleep surrounded by a huge white down comforter. Meanwhile, the other me was watching this scene end as she typed away at her word processor.

Later on, I woke up around midday to an empty bed and an empty feeling in the house. The fog had burned off and the sun was shining down on the neighborhood. I could see all sorts of activity through the massive picture window- the paperboy delivering the early afternoon paper, some senior neighbors taking their dogs for walks, several joggers, and lawn maintenance workers buzzing about blowing the leaves into neat little rows along the curb. Outside, everything seemed normal. But inside the house, there seemed to be something hanging in the air, threatening to puncture my perfect life at any moment. I found that I couldn’t breathe for if I did, I wouldn’t be sucking in air because there wasn’t any around me. It was as if I was sitting in my bed, in my home, in my life but it was all contained in a vacuum where time stood still and nothing moved. It felt as if layers and layers of minutes and hours were accumulating in the room with me, weighing everything down. Yet I couldn't remember anything more than the few minutes I was awake in the early morning and this afternoon.

I realized I couldn’t hear the baby and I tried to hurry and rise out of bed as well as release myself from the fog I had carried over from my dreamless and feverish sleep of the day. My body ached immensely. I assumed at first that it was due to recently giving birth but the pain was immense. Every step radiated sparks of fire up my legs through my large belly and to my chest where my heart struggled to keep beating. Several times my heart seemed to skip a few beats and it left me struggling to gasp for air. I made it to the master bedroom door after several minutes of single step walking. My other half, writing the story from somewhere outside the room but still able to see the action as if above my head from a thought bubble, described the slow movements as similar to the moonwalks that astronauts take. I was slow, shaky and I took rather giant goofy steps to get through the pain and the vacuum feeling in the room.

For some reason, once I made it to doorway, I forgot about the baby. The air here had been restored somewhat and I could breathe much easier. Unfortunately, my memory had not returned. I turned and went into the bathroom, sensing something wasn’t quite right. The room was decorated the way I remembered- lots of yellows and blues in the happy curtains and the fluffy toilet seat cover. Bright towels and knickknacks sat on the vanity. But my personal effects were all missing. I yanked open the drawers and vanity mirror to find only my husband’s toiletries staring back at me. My toothbrush and toothpaste (he hates the taste of mint in the morning so I get mint and he gets cinnamon), hairbrushes and curlers, all my makeup... it was all gone! I freaked out and started yelling. It was then that I noticed the toilet seat up and I glanced down at the bowl. There at the bottom sat several of my items. The shiny medal from the tweezers and the scissors glinted in the light as if to wink at me like inanimate objects do in Disney movies or those dippy romantic comedies where the heroine learns a valuable lesson but still gets her man in the end. “Hi! We’re down here!” they seemed to say, “And we know a secret you don’t know!” CHING! I became enraged at the sight of those things glinting up at me and I plunged my hand in the toilet to retrieve them (um, can we say yuck?!?). Before I had a chance to wrap my fingers around any of the items, I heard the baby cry again. The task at hand suddenly seemed insignificant and I ran off to find the baby.

The baby’s room was dark and quiet. I was instantly soothed as I entered but the moment didn’t last for the baby let out a howl and I rushed to her crib. Unfortunately the new nanny (that I didn’t remember hiring or even agreeing to hire in the first place!) brushed past me and scooped up my daughter before I had a chance to touch her. She quickly moved out of range for me to touch my child, gripping my daughter tightly in her arms and all I was left with was the sweet scent of my baby’s skin lingering around the crib. I ran after the nanny, yelling at her for interfering and she coolly shot back at me “This is what I was hired to do, ma’am.” She placed the baby in a bassinet and went to prepare a bottle.

I looked down at my little girl, happy to finally have her right in front of me, and I attempted to catch her attention as she glanced wide-eyed around the room with her big eyes. She paid me no attention. In fact, she seemed to look right through me. “Is this normal for newborns to ignore the faces of other adults?” I asked the nanny. “Oh, perhaps she is still adjusting to everything, ma’am.” I was a little disappointed so I bent forward, intending to pick up my daughter, but my attention was instead directed towards the rush of blood to my head and my rapid heart beat, threatening to cause me to faint to the floor. The nanny noticed this and stepped between me and my daughter. “You need to go lay down.” She motioned with a flick of her wrist. “Shoo! Shoo!” And with that, she turned and grabbed my daughter from her bassinet and waltzed into the kitchen, perfectly capable of taking care of the baby that I couldn’t even manage to pick up. I went back to bed and cried myself to sleep. My other self watched the scene unfold and typed away as the light faded from the scene.

Five o’clock rolled around and with it the shadows on the wall in the bedroom from the streetlights signaled an early nightfall. Winter would be here before I knew it. I had spent all afternoon in bed, sleeping without dreaming (or remembering my dreams). I lay in bed, too depressed to get up. I was living a life where I was not needed, where I could barely move from room to room, it hardly seemed worth it to even sit up in bed and pretend that I was alert. Suddenly I heard my husband’s car pull into the garage and I snapped out of the fog I wallowed in. He was home. He would be sympathetic, apologetic and he would make it all better!

I forced myself out of bed, fighting through the excruciating pains and I made my way to the bedroom door. I actually had to wave my hands in front of me, trying to force the heavy air out of my way. It had thickened considerably since the morning. I called out to my husband and got no answer back. Once outside of the bedroom, I again moved more quickly, as if time speeded back up to normal, and I hurried to the kitchen where I could hear him having dinner with the nanny and our daughter. I rounded the corner and found him sitting on one side of the baby and the nanny on the other. They looked as if they belonged that way. I also noticed no plate had been set out for me and no extra chair was available. At that point, my mood turned sour. I asked my husband angrily why he did not come see how I was doing when he first got home. He ignored me. I asked him again, this time louder, and waved my hand in front of his face. He gave no indication that he’d seen me or heard me. I became irate and yelled at the top of my lungs, “What is your problem? Why are you ignoring me?!? Is this have to do with our fight or what??!” Everyone at the table continued eating and chatting away as if everything was normal. I looked at the nanny and she was trying her best to ignore me but I caught her in the act of starting right at me and blinking repeatedly as if to say “you don’t exist and I’ll prove it!”

I slammed my hand on the table. Instantly I felt the sheer pain in my wrist and elbow. My heartbeat sped up again and I could hear a roar, a rush of noise, growing in my ears. But no one reacted to the blow on the table, no dishes shook, and no sound echoed back at me. My husband got up and cleared the table, but not after patting the baby on the head and thanking the nanny for dinner. She waited until he was out of ear shot and then she turned and stared at me.

“What is going on here?” I cried.

“Don’t you remember anything?” She asked, getting up from the table and coming around to my side.

“No! No! I don’t know!” I sputtered.

“Think! Think back!” She whispered in my ear. “Where were you yesterday? What were you doing?”

I tried to focus on her words but they started to melt away as soon as she got them out of her mouth. All I could hear was the roar of blood rushing to my brain and a loud whistle-like sound in my ears. “Where…are…you…supposed…to…be…?” Everything was slowing down and her words made less and less sense to me. The other me, (watching from below?) was engrossed in her typing, her fingers flying faster and faster and the scene began to disintegrate before me. It took everything I had to try and focus on remembering. What was I doing here? Why did I feel like I didn’t belong?

The nanny blew into my ear "Remember!" She whispered quietly.

And suddenly I did.

I was dead. I had died weeks ago just after my daughter was born. I never got the chance to hold her. She never got to feel my warmth because they whisked her out of the room just as I lost consciousness. My husband, distraught with grief, hired this nanny to take care of the baby who would never know her mother. But this was no ordinary nanny and she didn’t happen upon his want ad by chance. She sought our family out because she could still sense my confused spirit around. She was there to help the family but more importantly to help me move on.

All of this came rushing to me as my ear drums burst. The life I thought I was leading was melting away before my very eyes. The dishes on the table cracked and melted into the wood, the painting on the wall dripped down as if the oils had been painted directly onto the surface, the floor gave way to darkness and I tried to cling to the floorboards as I found myself sucked out from where I had been standing.

As the dream quickly faded and the real me started to wake up, all I could hear was one word repeated again and again.

“Emily”

The other me, writing her novel, chose that word to be the title.

And then I woke up.
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(Some thoughts: this dream, as many dreams so often do, seemed to happen only in a matter of seconds. But I found myself spending quite a while today trying to recall it all and remember it accurately.

This dream seems to be a combination of the movie "The Others" and a short story by Stephen King called "That Feeling You Can Only Say in French What it is". Both stories had elements that found their way into my dream.

I found the toilet scene to be quite funny once I reflected on it. Everything was going down the crapper.

Oh yeah, I had just fallen asleep after another fight with Mr. Big. And that's exactly how I felt. It was all being flushed down the toilet. The whole relationship.

I really did have an Amy’s Enchilada for dinner. But I ate late and went to bed early. I think that combination was partly to blame for this crazy dream. Because the Amy’s organic line of foods has always been good to me before, I can’t and don’t want to really blame the dream on my food. I love Amy’s too much to stop eating it.

But maybe I’ll try and eat at least a few hours before bedtime tonight! )