Some people have drug-induced dreams; I have dreams distinctive to the nights when I don’t take my meds.
My doc think that they are actually panic attacks. Shortness of breath, deep deep sleep from which I cannot wake up, no matter how urgently my bladder is telling my lizard brain to do so. Sometimes I wake up drenched in sweat. My husband or kids tell me I moan in my sleep. When I wake up, my leg muscles often feel tight, like they’ve been clenched all night.
The themes recur: trying to run, run away from some danger, or run somewhere urgently, but I cannot make my legs pump, I sometimes cannot make them move and am crawling or dragging my legs in my dream. I often experience the loss and grief of a breakup with a real-life boyfriend from long ago, from adolescence. I’ve read that the loves we have as teenagers imprint themselves into our brain in a totally different way than adult, mature love relationships do. In my dreams, I revisit these relationships, often within the context of elements of my current life—I’m married, perhaps, or I have one or more of my actual children, or I am well into my 40’s.
And in my dreams these people are still leaving me, just as they did in real life years ago, and the grief is as intense and devastating as it was then. I remember how, when my most significant on-again, off-again boyfriend from the time I was 18 to 29 told me he was getting married, I lay down on the floor and cried for three days. Once, I called an ex whom I had been engaged to throughout the majority of my 20’s a year after our break-up. It was midnight, and I was crying and in despair, planning to beg him to reconsider. I got his answering machine, and the next day he left a return message thanking me for remembering his birthday (I had had the sense not to bare my soul to an answering machine that might be listened to in less than private circumstances). I had completely forgotten that it was his birthday when I called—all I knew was my own pain and desperation at being alone and unloved. Lately, perhaps because of the constant references to the war now that Obama is figuring out what to do about Afghanistan, an old flame from high school and part of college who went to West Point has been making appearances.
Frequently in my dreams, these old loves refuse to talk to me or even look at me. I often don’t even see their faces, but in that way that you just KNOW who someone is in a dream, I know who they are. And I am often unashamedly begging them to love me again, to forgive me for my lying, my infidelities, my inability to fulfill a promise of being the projection of the person I created for them to love. For in meeting my own need to be loved—and perhaps more importantly to feel lovable—I invented personae that I believed would meet their own needs—an unsustainable charade, of course, particularly as I juggled all the people-pleasing selves that I develop, and they began to overlap as my insecurities pushed me deeper and deeper into multiple simultaneous relationships in order to get the affirmation I needed and could not give to myself. These dreams are full of feelings of not being able to hold it all together, and even the illusion of the relationships I have created falling apart.
The day after these dreams, I am as exhausted as if I did not sleep at all. By evening I have developed a condition I call “fuzz-face” because of the humming and buzzing that seems to envelop my brain and filter everything I see and hear. I reach for coffee to get back some sort of edge to my reality, only to be so hyped up by dinner time that I am revving as high as a manic state. The psychopharmacologist once called all this a “bounce-back” effect. My brain, by now so acclimated to its ten pills a night, breaks through when its defenses are at their lowest, during sleep, and reverts back to organizing all those random electrical impulses that cause dreams into the reality I lived in for the first thirty or so years of my life.
