Dreams and nightmares

 A couple of weirdo dreams last night. The first was that I had somehow lost my ATM card for my checking account, and just kept pulling cards out of my wallet, hoping to find it in there, but knowing it really was not there. I was at some kind of conference or college/university event. I was getting increasingly panicked by not being able to find it, and for some reason thought I had to cancel all of my credit cards at once, and I had like 30 of them in my wallet. It was extremely unpleasant. The feeling tone, aside from panic, was self-castigation. I kept calling myself a loser, a fuck up, a fucking clown, an idiot, etc. I was tearing myself to bits. Why do you always do things like this? Why can't you just keep your shit together? What is your fucking actual damage? On and on. 

I woke up and felt as shitty as you might imagine, dear reader. Tossed and turned, at 5:30 in the a.m., also listing and enumerating all the real ways I am fucking up. You haven't done your laundry in three weeks, you have to go get supplies for your apartment, you are being incredibly irresponsible about grocery shopping, you have to get to the DMV and finally take care of all your CA stuff, you are losing control over each and every aspect of your life. Then I got hung up on a problem I had included in my environmental science class practice problems that I hadn't thought through carefully, and that the students did not have enough information to do. They had started emailing me the night before the assignment was due, complaining that it was an impossible problem. So I switched from excoriating myself over practical incompetency to what a shitty, stupid, fucked up, sloppy, dumbass teacher I am. 

Anyway, after about 45 minutes of this, I fell asleep again. 

And this time had another odd dream where I was traveling, as I had done almost the entire time from December 11 until the end of July this past year. I was in a national park or other official area of some kind that I was familiar with. I reached a crossroads, and decided to follow signs for a new road that led to some kind of scenic overlook. When I got to this new locale, I was absolutely astonished by the incredible view. It was a view of Utah style red rock buttes and canyons, but with the most bright azure blue water in pools and waterfalls. Just amazing, and slightly otherworldly. I felt so overwhelmed by the view that I was actually afraid I might drive off a cliff. I parked, and I saw a young guy sitting on the grass. A woman came up to him and said something funny and they sort of kissed. His response seemed profoundly clever to me and I wanted to write it down but didn't have any paper. 

Then a passenger train headed down into the canyon, and I asked the woman if she had ever taken that train, and she said, yeah, but it's brutal, you really need a ton of sunscreen, or you'll get severely burned. It was right around then that I woke up, at 8:30 a.m. this time. 

I have no idea really what either of these dream-mares are about, except that the feeling tone in both was one of serious anxiety, chaos, surreality, confusion, my own incompetence, and/or a bewildering sense of not quite being on planet Earth. 

I had been taking melatonin for a few weeks and stopped a couple of nights ago, and I often have vivid dreams when I discontinue melatonin. I take only 10 mg, but it really does build up or something and I periodically have to go off of it, or it messes with me. However, there's more to these dreams of chaos. I think adjusting to the new job, grieving, being alone in a new city, my 59th birthday last week, and a lot of exhaustion is all really catching up with me. Heterogeneously unwell and well, at once. A mixture. 

A pretty pic to take the edge off