I'm one of the rare few that can say, "I've never had a nightmare." I have, however, had bad dreams. Not in any sort of scary way, mostly in the aggravating way. Dreams where I actually wake up momentarily annoyed or angry. This does not happen very often, just on occasion.
It helps that I'm a lucid dreamer, so when things are going awry in dreamland, I simply say to myself, "I'm not dealing with this bullcrap," and wake myself up. But it's still obnoxious at times to have a bad dream, especially when you're not having a great deal of success sleeping in the first place. Waking up to end the annoyance means laying there for who knows how long to fall asleep again.
Take the other night, for example. Normally it takes me about three minutes to fall asleep. Hurray narcolepsy! I sleep straight on through until morning like a gd champ. Sometimes even longer if I'm not woken up by an outside source (Neelix, Aaron, alarm clock). On this night, for whatever reason, me and sleep were like pickles and whipped cream -- we just didn't go together very well. It took me more than an hour to finally fall asleep and then once I had, I was awake again just about once an hour, every hour all night.
It's not like I was just waking up out of the blue. No, it was just a bunch of little things that I'd normally either sleep through or recover from easily. Such as baby moving around like a hyperactive Olympian, having to pee, cat on my face, etc. Taking fifteen or more minutes every disturbance to fall back asleep. So when the bad dream happened, I tried really hard to just suffer through it.
Just what constitutes a bad dream? Comic con. I've never been to a convention before, so I was super stoked to be there with all my rad friends. Unfortunately, I was far too pregnant to keep up with them as they walked, so I fell behind until eventually I was wandering the convention floor all alone. This was the initial source of my discontent in the dream. Then, I had to talk to and deal with thousands of strangers (read: fan boys), making the aggravation expand exponentially.
I'm not sure which bothered me the most... the spoiled first experience at a con, being ditched by my friends, or having to talk to all those frothing fan boys, but the three combined served well to absolutely spoil my mood.
Eventually it got to the point where I had no choice but to wake myself up, because it was just too annoying. I didn't account for what time it was back in reality though, so I had no way of knowing that my difficulties were only going to get worse. Transforming my dream aggravation to real aggravation.
By then it was almost time to feed the cats, or more aptly, the cats thought it was almost time to feed them. They eat on a schedule, 8:00AM and 8:00PM. Otherwise Neelix will eat himself to death like a goldfish. For some reason, in the mornings especially, Neelix loses all concept of time and starts begging for food at 6:00AM. Typically I can roll over and ignore him long enough that he'll give up. Not the case this time, I wasn't asleep enough to ignore being poked in the face 1000x times by his giant paw. So I basically existed in a twilight state, being woken any time I neared actual sleep by pestering cats for two hours until it was actually time for them to eat.
Then, I got up to feed them and laid back down hoping to sneak in at least another hour or two before everyone else in the world was awake. Only by this point baby was convinced it was work-out time again, since I'd basically been up for two hours, and I couldn't fall asleep because he wouldn't hold still long enough for me to get comfy. Baby moving is always cool, even when it's uncomfortable, but it was goodbye to sleep for certain.
I wound up just getting out of bed and begrudgingly eating toast. Fortunately I wound up catching a nap at like 11:00AM.
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