dream a little dream.

i have been having the most vivid, realistic, narrative-driven dreams EVER lately.

normally, when i dream, it begins with a narrative but then convolutes into something strange. they're usually entertaining, but they're usually so odd and strange that, even when they feature people from real life, i am never in doubt that they are dreams.  even in the midst of them, i know they are dreams.

it's not that i don't know that the recent ones are dreams--because i do--but they're more harnessed to the narrative. 

for example, night before last, i dreamed that i was being deployed.  the way that they were determining assignments was by putting these weird old-people sunglasses that were representative of each of us into the slots for the assignments. essentially, they were letting us decide. i didn't want to go, though, because i didn't want to leave musicboy. i thought that maybe if i just didn't put my representative sunglasses into a slot, i wouldn't have to go.  then i realized that if i didn't do it, they probably would make me go anyway, but i would get a crappy assignment.  i remember being afraid of going somewhere that i would be hurt. 

[i have a friend currently deployed in iraq.  i just emailed him, so it makes sense that this would be on my mind, i guess.]

last night, after posting on facebook that i was having vivid dreams and having someone ask me if i was having weird food cravings or nausea (suggesting that i'm pregnant), i had a very vivid dream about craving tuna. i distinctly remember considering how to make tuna salad--add celery? add grapes? and i remember very much looking forward to it.  it was odd.

[obviously, this makes sense given the question.  but the recipe thing?  i can't remember if i actually considered eating tuna or if that was in my dream.  i may have, but in that detail? i think not. and i definitely do not feel the passion about eating it the way i did in my dream. no way no how.]

but the biggest dream was about my grandaddy. it seemed like a very long dream, focused on waiting on some test results about his heart.  i remember distinctly watching through a window between the doctor's office and the place where i was and seeing the doctor's mouth moving, reading his lips as he said that the news wasn't good. at first, in the dream, i was tough. but then suddenly, i was sobbing uncontrollably.  it was an incredibly vivid dream.

[my grandaddy is already sick, but has been for many years. there's no real reason that i should dream so vividly about a health problem, especially a health problem that he wasn't that worried about. he was very stalwart and strong about the bad news in my dream, which...isn't always the case in real life.]

what's different about these dreams, other than the subject matter, is the fact that, even in their length, they don't vary much from the original narrative. even when other things intervene, it always goes back to the original storyline, pulling me back into the story as well.  the focus is odd.  the details are still characteristic--strange, very oddly placed details (sunglasses? tuna? a theatre?)--of my crazy dreaming past, but the frequency and difference of these dreams is somewhat strange.  it doesn't matter if i'm sleeping well or sleeping fitfully, i am dreaming all of the time--and i'm remembering them in detail. 

weird. i don't mind it, especially. it's just different.