I have trouble sleeping. This is in large part due to the chronic pain, but I also struggle to turn my mind off. I can’t fall asleep without medication to help my body relax, and I frequently wake up at least once or twice overnight; sometimes once I wake up, that’s the end of sleep for me. It probably also has something to do with the hyper-vigilance under which my brain was long ago trained to operate. There’s no such thing as true rest, for me. But I’m working on it.

For years, my sleep problems were compounded by frequent nightmares. I have a vivid imagination — great for painting, not so great for sleeping. I avoid scary and creepy photos and videos and movies because inevitably it triggers scary dreams when I do finally fall asleep. When I was a kid, I particularly had bad dreams about bees and spiders. Even as an adult, I still get those ones on occasion. When I got older, and the villains in my life were identified as humans rather than insects and arachnids, they shifted accordingly. With years of hard work in therapy and a supportive husband, my nightmares have gone from a nightly experience to a rare occurrence.

Even rarer, though, are good dreams.

I wonder what most people would consider good dreams; for me, the bar is low. It’s a good dream to me if it doesn’t feature any of my abusers or leave me feeling sad or frightened. I don’t need anything actually good, just neutral. Perhaps that’s its own sort of commentary on my psyche, but I digress.

I had one such dream last night, a most curiously neutral dream, and I thought I’d write about it here because I don’t want to forget about it.

It was a warm summer day, the sun shining, the sky a brilliant blue. I was laying on my back in a field of soft green grass, occasionally shooing a random small cloud off my face — I don’t know if it was a cloud, or perhaps a weird clump of pollen, or dandelion fluff, but it was soft and white and I had to keep redirecting it up on the breeze that was blowing. Anyway, I was quite alone, and then suddenly I wasn’t. A young Gene Wilder was laying down next to me, happy and serene, wearing white. We didn’t speak for several minutes, until I finally broke the calm silence between us.

“Sometimes I think I’m not meant for this world,” I whispered to him, almost like a confession.

“Sometimes I think you’re right,” he told me in return.

He then started to say there was a patch of old forest nearby that he wanted to show me.

Then I woke up, having forgotten to turn off my Sunday school alarm since we’re on break for the next couple weeks. That was too bad, because I had been enjoying this dream, which as I said is a real rare experience for me. But it left me feeling befuddled. Have you ever had a dream that’s felt so unusual, so distinct from what dreams are usually like for you, that you wonder if it wasn’t a dream at all, but some kind of otherworldly…thing?

I think that my sentiment I expressed to Dream Gene Wilder is something that requires some internal reflection and validation. But I also think that even if my subconscious feels that way — possibly borne of the despairing situations that we all are facing in this day and age — the reality is that I still do live in this world, and have to make my way in it as best I can.

This dream was warm, though, and I’m going to try to carry that warmth with me into the real world today.