My Nightmare

Yesterday’s brutal slog was followed by a restless, fitful sleep which featured lots of tossing, turning and bizarre dreams. Mercifully, I finally woke up for good at 4:00 in plenty of time to take our house guest of the past four nights to All Saints Episcopal Church to catch his bus back to Nashville. The Chambers Singers Spring tour of 2020 was a raging success and Deen Entsminger was a delight to have in our home. A big thank you goes out to Leigh Anne Fort and Becky Baldwin for hosting seven young women in their homes since Friday. They treated their girls like queens and were the talk of the ensemble.

The subconscious mind is a strange place full of discordant, brooding inclinations that manifest themselves, I’m told, during periods of great stress. Yesterday would certainly have qualified as stressful, so I probably should have expected bad dreams last night. The one I got was a doozy.

We have neighbors in our culdesac who have a wonderful dog named Maverick. He’s a black lab and a world class sweetheart. We noticed recently that he didn’t look well, and learned late yesterday afternoon that he had to be put down. Such a sad thing to lose a beautiful, sweet dog. He was one of Lucy’s best pals. With that loss serving as a backdrop, my dream proceeded like this:

Overcome with empathy for my neighbor’s loss, I decided that I would loan them Lucy for a week or so to help them through their grief. The trouble began when it was time to get Lucy back. They refused to give her up, insisting to me that I had said they could keep her forever. Then, in the maddening way of dreams, I found myself in a excruciating loop of waking up every morning, walking around the culdesac and seeing Lucy out in their front yard, unable to come to me because of the electronic fence they had hastily erected. Lucy would whine at me each time I passed the yard. It was as close to a nightmare as I have ever experienced. When I awoke with a start at 4:00, I looked down at the end of the bed, and there she was stretched out to her full length like she owned the place. I have never been so glad to see a dog in my entire life. Even now as I write this, she is at my side, much earlier than usual...

As I was sharing this dream with Deen on our way to the bus this morning he said that I should try to find the mental file where it was stored and shred it immediately.

I agree.