Dreams and Nightmares

I've always been a very vivid dreamer. As a kid I had a reoccurring dream about not being able to find my brother and sister and another about riding a bike that flies. My most strange dreams are the ones where no matter what was going on in the dream, I'd be observing while sitting on the toilet with my pants down trying to get the job done. I continued to have those dreams almost every night well in to adulthood and actually only stopped in the last couple of years. I've done lots of research trying to figure out what that one means but the toilet dream doesn't seem to be in any dream dictionary that I've found.

Anyway, that brings me to my newest dream trend. Lately, I've been dreaming about Oliver dying. I've had three so far, about once every couple of weeks and each one is worse than the last. I actually don't remember the circumstances of the first one, just the feeling it left me with. The second had him being run over by the police truck driven by one of the other members. In the most recent one he was sick with something and was going to die and he was talking about committing suicide so he didn't have to go through it. I was screaming and crying that we had so little time left with him and I didn't want him to cheat us out of that time. With that I woke up and was literally sobbing in my sleep.

As you can imagine these dreams are really disturbing to me. I'm not a doom and gloom type of person or a paranoid mom so worrying about losing my kids is something that never crosses my mind. I guess I have a 'things like that don't happen to me' type of attitude so I'm shocked that my subconscious is thinking about it.

There is a part of me that keeps wondering if this is an omen of some sort but since dreams are never about the obvious, I don't think that's it. When I really analyze it I think that my brain is trying to tell me to appreciate Oliver more. I'll admit I'm struggling a bit with all the frustrations that go along with being the mom of a two year old. I'm sure he's a normal kid and he's just doing what two year olds do but I'm not always handling it well. I think I'm feeling guilty about how I treat him sometimes and it's manifesting in my dreams. When he's doing his best job at challenging me I can have a hard time keeping a lid on my emotions. I tend to yell more than I should and sometimes I say things that makes me cringe afterwords. It's easy to think that it's ok because he's young and he doesn't understand but I can see that even if he doesn't get the words, the tone makes an impression. It's true, sometimes he deserves the tone but sometimes my lack of patience is the reason he hears it and that's not fair.

In the last couple of days I've been trying to do better. When my temper starts to bubble I just think about how those dreams felt and it makes it much easier to cool off. I'm hugging a little more, saying I love you more often and trying to have a more zen outlook on motherhood. The nature of a two year old is to be frustrating much of the time but I don't want to have those types of regrets should the worst happen. And not being so angry makes day-to-day life much nicer.

By the way: I figured before I published this I should maybe do some dream research and I have found some websites that say I'm right on the money. Now if only I could find something about that toilet thing....