Nightmare

Woke up this morning vividly remembering a nightmare, was practically crying in frustration and almost whacked Darrell for leaving me behind in the dream.

It was Ryan's song contest day, though the settings were not familiar at all. I had been working or helping the kids so I was running late. Got stuck in traffic, but I was smashed into a tiny van on a small winding cobblestone street like they have in Europe. We wound our way down the street behind a whole bunch of other little vehicles (my sister Jan and brother-in-law Craig were smashed into the back of another car/van in front of me). We pulled over to the side of the road, got out and started running to the "school" (but not the school I know). I had to change clothes so I went into a bathroom with a long row of stalls but the floor was flooded, ankle-deep. I went into a stall to change, dropped the clothes I had changed out of onto the floor which had miraculously dried up. When I reached down to get the clothes, I found out the janitor had picked them up from outside the stall and put them in a bag and hung them in another stall. Unfortunately, that other stall was occupied by a girl who was talking on the phone. I waited and waited, feeling the urgency because I was late for the song contest. I finally wrote a note and stuck in under the stall so I could get my clothes. The girl came out but instead of giving me the clothes, she ran outside. From a wall of glass, I could see her outside on a grassy platform and she threw the clothes all over then ran away! I must have woken up at this point.

When I went back to sleep, the dream resumed but somewhere else. We had gone to eat something before the song contest. At the restaurant, we ordered and the food came a little bit at a time. Like usual, Ryan and I ate quickly, but, as usual, Darrell took his time. I looked at the time and it was 15 minutes until we had to be at the song contest, so I made Darrell throw his food in a doggie bag and we ran outside. I remembered that my family was still inside the restaurant and that I had wanted to pay for their meal so I gave Darrell my purse and ran inside. Funny that my family inside were my cousins, who in real life wouldn't be going to song contest! But I talked to them and told them I had to go and would see them later. I ran outside and saw that Darrell and Ryan had caught a taxi and were gone with my purse, which had my wallet and cellphone inside. So I impatiently stood on the sidewalk and waited for my family to come out so I could catch a ride with them. After a while, I got more impatient and went back inside the restaurant, only to find that they had left by another exit. So I was still stranded, no wallet, no cellphone. I noticed boys from Ryan's school (assumed this, since they were all in white) running across the street and climbing over a fence to get to a football field. Figuring this was a shortcut, I followed them (the dream skipped over my going over the fence, don't know how this was accomplished!). I wound up in an old wooden building which seemed to have gym equipment. I turned around and came face to face with my old assistant who was all scruffy-looking. I sat down and was resigned to the fact that I wasn't going to the song contest after all. Then I woke up.

I do get these kind of anxiety dreams once in a while and wake up exhausted since I'm usually running around chasing after things the whole time. Maybe because I woke on my own rather than because of an alarm clock that I remember everything so vividly. Usually I just remember the panic/anxiety/urgency feeling of the dream rather than the actual events.

If I have to go to the bathroom during the night but can't wake up for whatever reason, I have dreams about running around trying to find a toilet! I'm usually in a department store or large hotel or shopping center, and every toilet I find is dirty/gross or doesn't have toilet paper, or there are no doors and there are people standing around. So weird!