Nanni

Can a week running of nightmares every night be enough?

Please?

I keep waking up stressed out and squirrelly. It's not helping my anxiety levels any.

So, early Monday morning I woke up from a nightmare involving collecting oral histories on an exoplanet inhabited by people who vaguely resembled otters. I was working for a museum established on Earth by the local community of their diaspora, and the interviews I'd been sent to get heavily concerned a genocide that had taken place in the region where I was some decades earlier.

This wasn't really the nightmare part.

The local transport was terrifying. Everybody got around on these platforms which hovered about ten feet or so above the ground, just above the tops of the local grain (which was red and kind of furry) and these platforms didn't have rails or sides. They were just draped in really beautiful rugs - of course they were old rugs, but they were beautiful - and this did not feel secure to me at all.

That's not the really bad part.

The bad part is that some of my informants wanted to take me out to show me places they were talking about - villages that didn't exist now, specific trees where relatives of theirs were buried, fields that had been bombed. And of course I wanted to go! So we had to take the platforms part of the way because it was really too far to walk.

And they wanted to talk to me.

While we were traveling.

So there I am, trying very hard to listen closely and respond supportively, at the same time as I am fighting the urge to start crying because I'm so scared of these platform things and how fast they go and how there are no rails and nothing to hold onto but the rug. It was awful and hilarious at the same time.

So even though everyone was really nice to me and there were so many important and moving things being said, I was still really glad to wake up.

Had a nightmare last night about attending a public hanging. The man they were going to execute had done me a very great wrong, but I hadn't wanted him dead. Didn't want him dead. They were going to kill him because he'd hurt me, but I didn't want him dead, hadn't asked for his death, was trying to stall the executioners on some vague thought that maybe something would turn up, and he would be rescued, because I didn't want him dead, even though I hated him for hurting me.

All the prayers and pleas for the hanged man had to be read aloud before he was hanged, so I gathered them up and read them out as slowly as I could, elaborating where I thought I could get away with it to make them last longer. But then I dropped the feathers and scraps of last years leaves they were written on, the wind blew them beyond my reach, and the other women in the crowd picked them up and read them out, brisk and quick.

I was trying to think of some other tactic when I woke up.