I'll see you in my dreams

This week-plus of lucid dreaming is getting freaking ridiculous.  I wake up just as tired as I was when I went to sleep, no rest, no relaxation, usually with tears streaming down my cheeks for the first half hour of awakeness, which I attempt to chase away with several in-bed Sudoku games.

It's even become a joke in my dreams.  Last night, I went through several of them screaming "OK, people, I KNOW this is a dream, could you just get to the point, so I could move on to some hot and steamy sex dream?"

"Sure, right this way" and I am guided through a labyrinth that decidedly does NOT lead me to a hot and steamy sex dream.

I know these rooms well, although they have been dreamily altered.  My childhood home, the basement, my grandparents house, with all its secret passageways and strange rooms of bizarreness -- my old house in Cannington and my first house with my first husband even get cameos.  Vomiting snakes (seriously, subconscious, could you come up with something a little LESS obvious?!?), tap-dancing, somebody hiding my cello just as I'm supposed to go on stage, getting lost on my way to familiar places -- all the usual suspects are here.  It's not like I'm dreaming anything new and mind-blowing.

"I'm pretty sure I get the point, guys!  Can we move on -- if I can't have the steamy stuff, at least I could have a good night's sleep?"

"You know we can't do that" says my hookah-pipe-smoking Alice-in-Wonderland caterpillar mother from the raspberry divan, watching the maggots and snakes go to work on the several-feet-deep layer of debris piled onto the mouldy carpet (ooh look, there's the pool of blood and the glass coffee table and the coin collection).  Meanwhile, my Tasmanian-devil sister is spinning wildly, too fast to see anything, singing "we're all fine, fine, fine" to great applause and scolds of "why can't you be more happy and trusting and normal like her?", while bits of her body go flying off in all directions, sliced off by the fake armour surrounding the now Casa Loma hall.

Somebody's going to have to clean that up...

I'm sick of cleaning.  I don't want to step in the guck (ah yes, the murky ocean where I'm afraid to put my foot down -- another regular in my subconscious's not-terribly-inventive repertoire), so with a wink to my young niece, I lift my feet up off the floor, say "see, there's a way to rise above all this" and start to float away.

"Take me with you" she begs, and climbs onto my back.  Crap, she's heavy.  Floating isn't working so well.  But now at least we're outside.  "Here," I say, "I can't get lift-off with you on my back, but maybe if we take a run down this hill and then leap off that rock over the cliff, we'll be able to make it."

Run, leap...

Well, we aren't soaring like eagles, but the landing isn't as bad as you might think.  The tree trunk is mercifully soft and spongy.

"Maybe with some practise" my niece whispers.

***

Art and fear.

Art doesn't happen when you stay in your comfort zone.  Art happens when you fling yourself off the cliff and figure out how to land intact and hopefully with a modicum of grace.

I know my dream-niece's point.  Everything in my life the past few days has been telling me the same thing.  It's time to take a running leap.

I've done it before.

People have called me "fearless" in the past -- they're dead wrong.  I am an oozing pustule of fear.  I just don't let it stop me.  At least, not all the time.

I've done it before.  Although not in this way.  I do know what I have to do.  I do know the format in which it's going to barf its way out of me.  I know the rock.  I know the cliff.  I know what lies at the bottom.

And I am terrified.

Could someone please loan me a really awesome, steamy sex dream?  I don't think I'm ready...