I used to have really bad nightmares when I was little that my dad had died.  I would always find him dead, or at least find out that he was dead, and then proceed to totally lose my shit.  I would weep and gnash my teeth in the dream and inevitably wake up to find that the weeping and the gnashing of the teeth was happening in real life, too.  These nightmares were so real that I would have to get up out of bed and go to my parents room to assure myself that he was okay.  Only after such assurances could I ever get myself to go back to sleep.

Not long after Zack and I got married, the dreams made a switch.  Instead of dreaming that my dad was dead, I’d dream that Zack had died somehow.  Car wrecks and shootings and climbing deaths occurred regularly in my nightmares.  It didn’t take Zack long to figure out how to deal with my middle-of-the-night terror.  He wakes me up whenever he hears me crying in my sleep to assure me that everything’s okay and he’s not dead.  “I’m right here,” is what he usually says over and over again until I’m awake enough to believe him.

This morning I woke myself up weeping at 5:20.   Zack immediately went into his usual assurances, telling me that it was okay, he was right there beside me and not the least bit dead.  What he didn’t understand was that this was not your average Zack Is Dead night terror.  This was something of an entirely different breed.

Because I don’t, as a rule, usually discuss dreams, I’ll condense this down to two sentences for you.  In my dream I was being attacked by a home invader.  Immediately after the home invader left, one of my best friends, The Cheese, came over and I killed him by stabbing him in the heart with two different types of kitchen knives.

I was terrified in the dream when I was experiencing the home invasion, but it wasn’t until I realized that I’d killed The Cheese that the weeping really started.  I was so distraught: I’d killed someone, I’d made a terrible perpetrator identification error, and mostly because The Cheese was dead.

So at 5:22 this morning, Zack was one confused husband.  His attempts to calm me were not proving to be effective and I could tell that he was getting more and more perplexed by the situation by the second.  I finally was able to weep out an explanation to him.  I told him that I’d killed The Cheese between my gasps for breath.  I believe he started to chuckle a little bit, then he told me it was okay.  He  was pretty sure I hadn’t REALLY killed The Cheese and everything was going to be fine.

As I started to calm down, I realized that Zack might feel a little bit weird about the sequencing of the events.  First I dream about dead dad.  Then I dream about dead husband.  Then I dream about dead The Cheese?  What is that supposed to imply, you know?  That’s when I realized that I knew just the bit of information that I could tell Zack to let him know that everything really was going to be okay.

“In the dream,” I explained to him, still through a snotty nose, “when I killed The Cheese with two kitchen knives, I used a stabbing motion instead of a slicing motion, just like you taught me.  Even my dream-self pays attention to your self defense lessons.”  And with that we were both satisfied with our mutual comfort levels, and we fell back to sleep.