Personal Note: Anxiety Dreams

My dream consciousness begins with a sound, the sharp dry rasp of a cough in fact.  It comes from somewhere outside my room.  It is my daughter's cough, of this I am sure.  I am a parent and I know the sound of my daughter's cough from a mile away.  I listen from deep in darkness in what I am assuming is my bed because I haven't opened my eyes yet.  It comes again, and again.  That same dry, futile cough that does nothing to move or expel phlegm.

"Searching Dreams" a painting by Herve Martijn, a dutch painter.  Find his work here.

It comes again and again from the other side of the darkness that is my only other awareness.  Finally, I open my eyes and realize I am in my room, tucked away in the bed.  In the dream I don't know if my wife or the dog who normally sleep in the bed are there.  I don't even think of them.  I think only of my daughter and the cough.

I rise.

I move through the house silently, searching for my daughter.  I cross the hall to her room, but she isn't there.  I could have sworn I heard her cough from the other side of the door, but when I open it, she isn't there.  I hear her cough again, but this time it is from down the hall.  I move out of her room and further into the hall.  Her cough sounds like it is coming from downstairs, so I mount the stairs and descend into the further reaches of the house.  I search, always hearing her cough in the next room, around the next corner, but I can't find her.

I'm growing more and more anxious, more and more concerned about her cough as  I move because it seems like the individual coughs are growing more insistent, more frequent, and I don't want her to make herself sick with it.

As I move through the house, searching through room after room, I can't find her.  She is always "somewhere else," just beyond my sight, behind one more closed door.

I wind my way through the entire house, making my way back up the stairs again, and I'm becoming more and more unsettled by the whole thing.  I've already taken to calling her name.  I've been calling since I descended the stairs, but the only answer has been that dry hack.

Finally, I open the door to my office and turn on the light.  There she is.  She is curled up in the arms of my old friend Joel.  She is coughing and she is awake, but there is no distress in her.  Joel is equally calm, although he looks at her with a bit of concern.  When he sees me, he says, "I'm sorry.  I tried to take care of it.  I didn't want to wake you.  She's been at it for a while now."  He's so matter of fact about it.  He registers nothing about my panicked calls throughout the house, registers nothing about my pounding heart.  I cross the room to him and that's when I get my first glimpse at Shea.

When I get close to Shea, it is the open wounds I see first.  All over her body are small, crescent sores that glisten wet, but do not bleed.  Each sore is like a grotesque mouth grinning at me from Shea's arm, leg, or face.  The sores have appeared all over her face and one has curled the left side of her mouth into a cleft palette-like sneer.  Her lips are glossy with the seeping sore.  Her right ear is twisted and disfigured with the profusion of sores I find there.  I almost don't recognize her, and I turn to Joel aghast.

"What's wrong with her?"

"What do you mean?  She's got a pretty bad cough," he replies.  His voice is in no way sinister, in no way panicked.  He has the appropriate amount of concern for someone who only worries about a light cough in a child.

I stand Shea up in front of me and ask, "Are you okay, honey?"

"Yeah, Daddy.  I got a cough though.  Sorry to wake you."  This comes from Shea in her normal, sweet voice.  She's always so considerate, and she has no concern over the sores whatsoever.  I run my hands over them, feeling the slight pucker of flesh at each wound and the anxiety of the situation washes over me.  I can feel goose flesh running up my spine and into my hairline.  I itch with anxiousness...

And then I wake.

I wake itching.  While my consciousness in the dream birthed itself in sound, my waking consciousness rises to the itch, the creeping, full body, deep in the scalp itch of anxiety.  My breath is not rapid, but it is not restful.  My heart beats against the plate of my chest with more force than sleeping should require.  I am awake in the brightest, clear-minded sense of the word.  I don't rise through the mist of sleep.  I don't stumble through the cluttered room of consciousness and into clarity, but I rise bright and clear and aware of exactly what has happened, of exactly what my dream has been.

This is unusual for me.  I don't remember dreams.  Not with this amount of clarity I don't.  After using the bathroom and trying to return to bed, I give up on the futility of sleep at this point.  I know I will not fall easily back, so I rise and move through the real rooms of my house, the silent rooms of my house that don't even carry an echo of a child's cough.  I know exactly where I am going.

The nighttime view out my picture window.  A terrible shot, but you get the drift.

My house has a picture window at the front.  I find myself there, indian-style on the floor in front of the giant pane of glass overlooking my street.  It is after midnight and my neighborhood is silent.  I sit for a moment and gaze out into the semi-darkness.  My eyes adjust to the little bit of light coming from the streetlight down the street and the exterior lights of my neighbor's across the street.

The neighbor's light shines out at me from across the way, the nearby basketball hoop catching the light and glowing like a clouded pane of glass that, in another context, might be a patch of clouded sky, it's whiteness a promise of something.  I begin to breathe.  In through my nose.  Out through my mouth.  Again.  Breathe.  In through the nose.  Out through the mouth.  I focus on my neighbor's backboard, that clouded pane of glass.  "My window is dirty," I think to myself, noticing the dog's noseprints on the glass.  I straighten my posture and breathe, focusing on the backboard.  I do this over and over again, wiping stray thoughts from my head as I focus, deeper and deeper.  In through the nose.  Out through the mouth.  Breathe.  Again.  In through the nose.  Out through the mouth.

Picture provided by Jagaro - a meditation blog from New South Wales

I'm glad I chose meditation as my promise of the week.  After an indeterminate amount of time, I felt heart rate return to normal.  Even though the house is cold in the middle of the night, I was able to control my body temperature and focus on sustaining it through breath and concentration.  I felt my posture straighten, not through focus and control, but by my body coming back into itself, coming back through the controlled meter of breath and aligning itself, one vertebrae on top of another, my shoulders pulling back and down, opening my chest, and allowing me to breathe.

I eventually rose and found myself here.  In front of the computer.  I've been able to transcribe the dream with more clarity than I can ever recall having after a dream.  While I wrote this, some of the anxiety returned, the itch came back to my scalp when I remembered the open sores, but it contained none of the electric panic that rocked the earlier dream.  I had breathed that away, one circuit of breath at a time, in through the nose and out through the mouth.

It's something we can all use from time to time: a return to the power and simplicity of breath.