I’ve written quite a bit a bit about the dreams of my son and what infants could possibly have to dream about. I’ve written about the Sweet Dreams, and the Nightmares. But what about the parent dreams? Parents have recurring dreams about their children. They sometimes dream that:
They lose their child.
They forget they have a child.
Their child is on a cliff, and they can’t get to them.
OR…If they’re like my wife, they dream that their child (who is completely physically incapable) has climbed out of the crib and walked into the bedroom and is now slowly stalking us in our sleep, not unlike a certain demonic doll from cheesy 80’s movies.
Last night I had a dream. It wasn’t about my son, it was about football. More specifically, it was about my high school football team and my role on that team. Nevermind that my high school no longer exists. Nevermind that I had not been back there since 2000. Nevermind that the last year I played was 1997. No, the only thing that matters is that on the night of March 28, 2010, I was back on the team at T.W. Martin High School. It was the first game of the season and we were playing our arch rival, who, in my dream was some team in University of Wyoming yellow and brown. It was a very important game and our whole season was apparently riding on that night. In practice, our coach kept telling us how important it was for us to do our job so that we could win the game. That was basically all the instruction he gave…”Do your job.”
I was so pumped up to be playing again (in my dream, I realized that I was 13 years removed from playing football), and I was excited that I was going to “do my job” and we were going to win the game and be champs (even though it was the first game of the season). I decided to rest before the big game so that I would have all my strength to be able to “do my job.” So, I went into the field house and took a nap.
The next thing I know is that I’m being awakened by the sound of cleats on the concrete floor of the field house. I jump up, realizing everyone is ready…but then it hits me, they’re coming back into the field house. The game was over. I kept asking, “why didn’t you wake me up? I didn’t hear anyone wake me up so I could “do my job.” I was told that they didn’t need me to “do my job” after all, and that they won the game anyway. I was simultaneously disappointed and relieved. Then I woke up (for real).
Immediately upon waking, I realized the meaning of the dream, and it was almost a literal allegory for last night. Before bed, Jamie informed me that she wanted to try to keep Ryne from waking up for night feedings because he should be growing out of that by now. Her plan was to have me go in and calm him back down and get him back to sleep if he woke up. I needed to do it, because if she went in there, he would automatically assume food was on the way and he would pitch a fit until he got some milk.
So I went to bed thinking to myself that I needed to make sure to get up if I heard him crying and settle him back down. I had to psych myself up for this because I didn’t want to sleep through it, or have Jamie forget that she wanted me to go calm him down and just do it herself. So I reminded myself as I was falling sleep to “do my job.”
Then morning came. At 6:30, I woke up in a panic. I knew I had not gotten out of bed, and I had not heard him crying. So I asked Jamie what time he had woken up. And…he hadn’t. He slept right through the night. I had not needed to “do my job,” and we had a victory. It is super scary that my subconscious was playing all this out so vividly in my dream. I have other dreams that are very weird…but they almost make no sense at all in relation to anything else. I will share those at another time. Do you have any recurring dreams or just weird dreams in general? Please share by leaving a comment at the top of this post!
