Yes, I Know It Didn't Happen, But You Still Shouldn't Have Said That

I should have known I was getting seriously sick when my dreams turned on me. Most of the time, I dream, but it's inconsequential. I wake up, and they're gone. The exceptions are rare, and are typically nightmares or what I've gotten in the last week, which are strongly negative emotional dreams. What strikes me most about both is that, upon waking, you know you were dreaming, but you can't shake the emotional response.

On Saturday morning, I woke up convinced the world was either entirely pissed at me, or was about to be. In my dreams, both my boss and my wife were angry with me (which is of course preposterous, what with me being the perfect employee and husband). What was worse, though, was that there was this additional dread, what I think of as report card anxiety, where there was some other thing that I had done that neither of them knew about yet, but was going to really make them mad. (Did I ever mention that, at times, I was not the most applied student?) I don't know what it was, but it was so intense that when I woke up, I spent the first half of my day with this dread hanging over me, trying to figure out what it was that I had done that was going to bring it all down on me.

Last night was even stranger. I dreamed that my lovely wife and I were fighting. Not like boxing, or even yelling at each other. Instead, in my dream I was driving down the road, and the entire time she was harping on things I do when driving that irritate her. Now, let me be quick to point out that, while she will let me know when something bugs her, this is not a constant occurrence in real life, and when she expresses criticism, it is typically in a constructive manner. In the dream it got so bad that, in an effort to dramatize that I took a corner too sharply, she leaned into me, causing me to actually drive off the road.

The dream went on for a little bit more, and then I woke up around five in the morning. I went to the bathroom, I went back to bed, and then nothing. No sleeping. Why not? Because I was &$%#ing furious with my lovely wife over this fictitious altercation. I just lay there, internally grumbling about how I was just trying to drive, and if she had so many problems with how I drove, why didn't she ever offer to drive, blah blah blah. All over something that never really happened. Bizarre.

The funny thing to me is that first, it never happened, and second, even after waking up enough to use the restroom, I couldn't shake the anger. Eventually, I did get back to sleep, but when the alarm went off, I felt like I hadn't slept at all, and I was half expecting her and I to start bickering. Fortunately, we didn't, and I've figured out that my dreams are being driven by my illness (despite the last year's events, I really don't get sick often, and forget how getting really sick effects me). Hopefully, this realization means that tonight I'll actually rest and dream about normal things.

After all, the Enterprise isn't going to just start captaining itself.