I had an awful night’s sleep last nite. I awoke at like 3:30 a.m. from a sickening dream that made me afraid to go back to sleep.

I dreamt that I woke up in the middle of the night next to Mr. W, but that I’d lost all attraction for him and desire to be with him, so I got out of bed and despite his protests, left.
Somehow I ended up in bed, in a hotel room, lying on the dark-haired chest of someone else, filled with the cozy ease that only being secure about our future could bring. I looked up and it was the cheating ex I was lying with. I sat up in confusion. Was I back together with him? Why would I do that? Slowly, my senses came back to me and I “realized” that I was in a Vegas hotel room suite that somehow he and I had arranged to meet at. I told him that I’m too conflicted and confused right now to be there or to pursue anything with him and that I was leaving. He angrily packed up his stuff as well, even tho I thought it was his room and he was there for his own reasons. I picked up my things, came back to the bedroom area to get other things, and saw that he’d passive-aggressively put a photo of me on the coffee table that he was apparently leaving behind, as well as a piece of paper that he’d scrawled some lines of poetry on. The poetry was to the effect of how happy he was, how unbelievable it was, that the time for our reconciliation had arrived. He’d apparently written that when we made our plans to meet up, which event was not in my dream. Anyway, I left the room, he left behind me, and I exited into a parking garage. An Asian girl, one of his optometry school friends, I assumed, was coming up to meet up with him to hang out. I said hello and apologized for not being able to hang out with them as planned and bolted. I ran down three flights of spiral parking garage stairs but the ex and his friend, coming down a more direct side stair that I hadn’t noticed was there, ended up right next to me on the ground floor. I kept trying to run from them, to create a larger distance (even tho they were not chasing me), but I moved so slowly, as if I was chest-deep in a swimming pool. I realized the most effective way to move faster was to kick off against the ground at a diagonal, just like in water. So I did that and struggled my way into what appeared to be a restaurant.
Now I was attending a dinner party in a casual bar-type restaurant with long cafeteria-style tables. Our party took up three tables one in front of the other; I was in the front table. Childhood friend Vicky was across from me, her sister Karen was a few people away to my right. I wondered whether I was even invited to this thing as, looking around, I didn’t see any of my regular hang-out friends altho I did recognize some people from James’ BBS from back in ’93 and some of Vicky’s pharmacy school friends. The guys around me were dorky geeky fobby types that I would not consider dating. All of a sudden, as if agreed upon and on cue, three such dorky guys sitting behind me turned at the same time and started trying to chat us up. Instantly, Vicky, Karen and I got up to leave. We refused to be picked up on by these guys. And then I woke up.

I laid there in the dark, trying to interpret the dream. Okay, so my impression of Mr. W and the ex in the dream was that Mr. W was lightness, and the ex was darkness. So they must be flip sides of a coin, two polar opposite men that I was going back and forth between. So that conflict represented light: a relationship I was in most ways absolutely happy and carefree about, except that it doesn’t offer me a future I’d originally expected of myself; and dark: a problematic painful relationship that did offer me the traditional future. Neither is ideal and the conflict comes from my internal current conflict regarding what kind of future I can live with and what I’m willing to sacrifice. The dinner party is my fear that if I leave the current relationship, there will be no good guys on the market that I’d want to date, which is also a very real fear in my head.

I eventually fell back asleep after 5am and dreamt that I was being sent off with some friends to boot camp, apparently having enlisted and been accepted into some branch of the armed forces. My parents gave me a warm send-off. My mother, to my surprise, wasn’t heart-broken and was rather jovial about it. As I stepped onto the bus, I was very aware that I really didn’t want to go, and I asked a friend behind me in the bus line whether it’s possible to drop out after boot camp. She was dubious about that. And then I woke up again. I wonder what THAT dream meant. That I should do what I want and not worry about my parents, they’ll be fine? But I hadn’t WANTED to enlist.