I had another barmy dream – this one was fraught and very unpleasant indeed. So bad in fact I woke myself up.
It was twilight. I was in some kind of resort/camp place working as one of the staff. At one point there was a dog/wolf loose and I was trying to catch it (it was dangerous) with a lecturer from college and some other people. The dog looked like it was gonna get past me so I yelled at it. The lecturer said something like “don’t do that, it’ll run away!” and I yelled back something like “don’t have a go at me! Look if we go round there we’ll catch it!”. I think we were sucessful, but later on (yet still twilight) suddenly it was essential to leave this place. The mountain opposite was an erupting volcano and lava was flowing towards our moutain with the resort on it. I paused with someone on the hillside and admired the lava – saying that it was actually quite beautiful in a deadly kind of way. However haste took over again and I ran from the resort to where my parents were waiting. They’d come to pick me up but apparently I was driving and we were leaving in my car.
Just as we were running to the car, me panicking more than them, I realised I’d left my small paper bag of earrings behind (this bag is a real life bag – I meant to bring some earrings up that’d I’d bought specially for the May Ball and I left them at home in a real paper bag – this obviously affected me a lot!) and I couldn’t leave them so I sprinted back to the room where they were and my lecturer was sitting there working on his laptop. I asked him why he wasn’t leaving as I rooted for my bag talking non-stop – I ended my sentence with “where’s my bloody bag!” and immediately found it (this never happens in real life). He said nonchalently that he was staying there – the lava wouldn’t reach him. I remember thinking that he was a nutcase at that point but I nodded in an unsure manner anyway. He was in the tallest point of the mountain. I said “I’m sorry about earlier” and he said “You mean yesterday” all smarmy like (he’s nice but patronising in real life – my dream captured his personality perfectly). I blathered something about having worked non-stop since then do hadn’t realised about the day change and he said (smarmy) “That’s ok 
” Yup he winked at me. All the while I’m thinking “Why am I having a conversation when my parents are waiting in danger for me…?!”
I ran back to my car and we leapt in – I reversed but the lava was faster and it reached the front tyres and they started to smoke. But then it slowed and we got some distance and I tried to do a handbrake turn or something stupid and spin really quickly. My Dad said “Don’t rush!” (which is very true to life – I drive with too much haste) which was good advice retrospectively as I’d spun too much and left the road and was driving along a gully. “We have sticky time!” said Dad, which apparently means the time before the lava catches up to us. And I got this horrible gut wrenching feeling as the gully steepened and I knew my little car would never get up vertical cliffs that I was responsible for my parents’ impending deaths.
At that point it got too much and I work up forcefully in terror (I felt my brain go “WAKE UP” and yank the other bit of brain up to conciousness – very weird) with my heart pounding. I was at H’s after a party and I knew I’d have to drive home once I was up, and the thought of being in a car terrified me – as if I’d had a bad crash and was too traumatised to drive. Luckily it faded enough after I slept for another hour or so (I’d woken up at 5.30am) so I could drive, but it was horrible!
It was worse than the one about the sheep. *shudder* I don’t like it. At least the sheep one was like watching an over-the-top film. This one was too real. The lecturer was spot on, that paper bag featured, I do drive stupidly like that when I’m panicked, and I blather when I’m faced with sarcastic people. It was nasty too because usually in bad dreams there’s no hope. Like the lava doesn’t stop, or I wouldn’t have made it back after the bag finding. But this dream kept doing little bits of success interspersed with inevitable disaster which is an extremely sadistic thing for a dream to do. Bad dream.
When I was little I used to get the worst dreams when I was stressed. I had a recurring nightmare that happened whenever I was stressed where there was an amazingly bright white light – like a supernova. “Terrific” describes it best – it invokes terror in the very ancient sense of the word. But on the edge of the light were black grumbling things – they didn’t like the light and they muttered and grumbled as they slunk away from it, but they couldn’t really get away as there is nothing outside the light, in the same sense that there is nothing outside the universe. And then there is the pink table and parasol set that is somehow associated with the white light. Just when a dream is being rather sensible and poignant it brings out the pink parasol. That was it, but it was recurring. I missed it when it went as it stopped when I was still too young to remember it and analyse it properly and I wanted to do that.
So maybe these disturbing dreams are indications of abnormally high stress levels? I currently have social, academic and pending physical stress plus the emotional stress that acompanies all of them so that might be it. Exams and stuff don’t stress me – I get depressed but not stressed. However it’s rare for so many types of stress to happen at the same time… probably hasn’t happened since I was being bullied in primary school when the recurring bright light dream featured…
