Hortus Deliciarum

I normally really like dreaming. I’ve been having lucid dreams (mixed with non-lucid) for a long time; I was six or seven when I learned that if I opened my eyes REALLY widely in a dream, it triggered something that would wake me up and take me out of a particularly terrifying nightmare. Since then I’ve had fairly few nightmares, all told, and I generally like exploring my dream world. The last couple of nights, on the other hand, have been disturbing.

Never fear, I won’t bore everyone with all the details – suffice it to say that in my dreams in the last two nights, I’ve been shot in the knee by a sniper while trying to turn in a paper that was late to a professor whose class (and then whose office) I could not find. I’ve been berated by an old friend for not keeping in touch and been engaged to a different old friend. Apparently my subconscious is exploring my lesbian side, which is fine but stressful when I’m trying to catch a flight after having lunch with a group of friends, but still haven’t been served ten minutes before I have to leave to catch the flight, and a cute Canadian customs official is after me about my US passport details, and I end up falling for him and have to confess this both to my female fiancee and to my real-life husband.

They’re horrifyingly realistic while I’m in them and I wake up still scared, only to realize with an overwhelming flood of exhausted relief that it was only a dream.

Stress much? I don’t need a therapist to tell you that I’ve got a lot on my mind, perhaps the largest portion of which is not something I can discuss in a public blog entry. I also feel that something is on the precipice of a huge change; what that something is, I don’t know, but all the possibilities are terrifying and I’m scared. Whether the latter is true I don’t know – what I do know is that the anxiety is causing the dreams and having both my waking and sleeping lives be stressful is tiring.

***

My legs hurt. I seized the three or four hours of windy-but-not-as-freezing-as-earlier hours of afternoon “nice” weather and used them to completely rearrange my deck garden. I put up shelves supported by bricks and concrete breezeblock (the latter helpfully put in place by my Strong!Dad!), shifted all the pots away from the wall to put up the shelves, and then shifted all the pots back on to the shelves, including a number that I repotted. This doesn’t seem like exhausting work, really, but my legs disagree – the muscles on the backs of my thighs are screaming in outraged protest.

And I kinda like it. I liked that I worked hard and that I’m feeling it in my body. I’m trying to figure out if this is a semi-masochistic old “EXERCISE HURTS BUT IT’S GOOD FOR YOU!” tape or what. I do, however, know that my recent desire to stretch is probably going to lead to a yoga class. If, that is, I can afford it. The first eight months of this year have been kicking/are kicking/will kick my butt in financial terms, so finding the money to go do something, even if it makes my body feel good, is hard.

We shall see.

And in the meantime, I’ll worry about that too.

P.S. I meant to say that the deck garden looks FABULOUS and I WILL take pictures, once I’ve got batteries in my camera again. It was a joy – pure and utter bliss – to see my perennials poking up shoots, and my container-hydrangea jabbing out new leaves, and my hellebores, primroses, and violets blooming away. A touch of much-needed life in this especially cold, dreary Seattle spring.