I know many women have strange, very realistic dreams when they're pregnant. I don't. But: I have strange, very realistic dreams when I am sleep-deprived. Like these days. Sometimes they are so scary that I have to wake up Jeremy and take moment to have him talk me back into reality. Other times, I'm so glad that Sterling wakes up to eat so I can get some cuddles and love after a nightmare. A few weeks ago, I had the worst dream I can remember ever having. That one from when I was nine years old where all my family members were dressed up as ghosts on a pirate ship has finally been knocked off its "worst nightmare ever" perch.
These dreams are the kind of horrible where when I wake up and realize it was just a dream, I am so incredibly glad that I almost shiver from relief.
There are a few recurring themes. I often find myself dreaming that we are back in Syria. The other night, I dreamed that Jeremy joined the FSA and I had to get the kids out of the country by myself. We went in a caravan with our neighbors through the partially destroyed city, but in the chaos, Miriam and Magdalena were left behind with another family. So awful.
I also often dream about my children and other people's children dying in easily preventable ways - drowning or suffocating, etc. due to careless parents. Again, just awful.
When I find myself up early in the morning with Sterling, the sleep deprivation makes me a little irrational. Jeremy and a friend climbed Jebel Shams in Oman on Sunday. I heard from them via text on Saturday night that they had reached base camp (for lack of a better word). Then I heard nothing. Nothing at all. By Monday morning, I was so worried. Before 5am (Sterling and I were awake because he had woken up to eat and then spat it up all over me), I had made a list of everyone I was going to contact to search for my missing husband who was probably lying on a ledge at 3000m, horribly injured and cold and in need of assistance.
Turns out, cell phone reception was just spotty. He sent me a text before lunch on Monday telling me that everything was fine. He and his friend had a good laugh at this silly paranoid wife and her increasingly frantic texts (which possibly culminated in "if I do not hear from you by noon today I am calling someone to go find you." Noon, because even if one of them was injured, the other would have been able to walk down to a village by then. I thought it all through. At 4am).
Anyway. Sterling slept from 8 - 5.30 last night, so now I feel like I can conquer the world. And maybe stop having bad dreams.