Dreams

I had the weirdest, most vivid dreams last night. They were almost but not quite lucid dreams - in most of them, I was aware I was dreaming and could make active decisions about how I responded to the off-base events and images, but I wasn't completely able to disengage. A couple of them were a bit disturbing too, and this morning I am avidly Googling "dream interpretations" (as you do) to see if there are any Jungian archetypes in play.

One of my dreams was a variant on my most common stress-overload dream (in which I lose something essential, forget to do something essential, or are in some way negligent in a manner that has severe consequences). In this dream, I somehow became aware that it was 8:30 at night and I had unaccountably failed to pick up my 8 year old from primary school. I rang my partner (in my dream) and he told me "don't worry, she went to after school care". This relieved me for about a dream-minute until I exclaimed, "But after care finishes at 6! Where is she NOW?" My dream-self then ran around in a panic and the situation was never resolved. Icky dream. 2/10 Did Not Enjoy.

The next dream - the most proximate to waking for the day, and hence the most vivid in my mind - was a doozy of an odd duck. In my dream, I had hosted a gathering of some kind - a dinner party, I think - for a bunch of people who I was hovering on the edge of recognising, but didn't actually recognise. They were, though, clearly labelled in my mind as "friends from university days".

At the conclusion of the gathering, I offered everyone a hot drink (as you do). One guy, instead of asking for coffee, tea or hot chocolate as others did, put in an incredibly elaborate order for a fancy multilayered coffee concoction, down to the detail of how the foam had to look and so forth. In the dream, I massively resented this but instead of pushing back, I did my best to make the drink. Then when I gave it to him, he took one sip and spat it out, saying it was too cool and too sweet.

In my dream I was filled with the most incandescent anger towards this entitled prick and I was gibbering internally with rage, but instead of verbalising this to Awful Dude, I picked up the dropped cup and offered to make the drink again. All the while, the most corrosive anger was eating my dream-self up and I wanted to hulk-smash the entire world.

I woke up from that dream still furious, and the background miasma of that feeling is still lingering. I have had dreams about being angry before, but usually the anger is focused on a person in my personal life with whom I am in fact frustrated or cross (often someone with whom it would be radically unsafe to verbally express anger), or is self-directed. Those dreams, while not pleasant, are not hard to understand.

Who, though, is this fictional coffee-drama dude in this dream? Why is dream-me pandering to his nonsense? Why am I so incredibly angry and so unable to say anything to him about it? WHAT DOES IT MEAN??

I know I'm going to keep worrying at this throughout the day, interrogating my sulky subconscious until more clues get disgorged. I feel like I've been sent a strongly worded internal memo by the subliminal part of my consciousness to my waking mind, and I'd better find a way to understand it, or there might be downstream consequences I won't like. My subconscious always knows well ahead of my conscious mind when trouble's brewing; I am ill-advised to ignore warning flags when they are waving so vigorously in my slumbers.