Nightmares

Usually I consider myself to be a sound sleeper.  If I have dreams they tend to be very vivid, but nothing that leaves me emotionally stressed or unable to get a good night's sleep.  Last night was unusual because I woke up repeatedly, mostly because of the fact that my dreams were causing me so much stress and emotional pain.  I woke up in a sneezing, coughing fit around 3:45 in the morning and was immediately given a glass of water to "get the dust out of my throat."  But I woke up again and again afterward feeling scared and extremely upset and I couldn't understand why I was feeling that way.  My dreams were unpleasant (to say the least), one was where I was sitting down with my dad talking and he died during the conversation from what my dream self stated was an aneurysm.  Waking up from my dream I was gasping from shock and I felt colors-black and gray.  The colors made me start crying and what was worse is that I wanted human comfort more than anything, but a certain someone beside me was just sleeping away without a care in the world.  And I can't blame him for doing so, but in that moment I felt like I was 3 years old having a scary dream.

It's never a good feeling after waking up from a nightmare.  The emotions and feelings you felt in the dream seem to follow you into your conscious and you can't ever really seem to shake them off.  Something feels wrong with today and I don't know how to fix it.  Nothing feels good, nothing feels like it's going to make me feel better, not even going back to sleep to start over.

I've been really thinking about things lately and I am starting to think that I have seasonal affect.  I've noticed that my performance with school is never as good as it should be during the fall semester, but during the spring semester I tend to feel like a whole new person.  For some reason, once October comes around, getting out of bed is a physical struggle, making necessary phone calls and scheduling necessary appointments seems so overwhelming that I almost don't do anything to get those accomplished.  I get pulled into a funk and I can't enjoy life as I'd like to.  I get the feeling that I'm surrounded by large tall pillars that start blocking me in and I can't find a way to get around them.  Lately it seems like everything I want to do-whether it be going shopping or doing more research about how to get my career started-becomes so overwhelming and difficult that I give up and push it aside.  I shut down.

The past few months make me wonder if I've lost my sense of independence.  Being in a relationship makes the independent streak change so radically because you become part of a partnership, that I question what being independent really brings to it.  Why have the ability and ambition to do everything on your own when you now have to decide things together, accomplish things together?  Obviously, the together part is a positive thing, but it goes against my independence that I feel like I'm fighting myself against my relationship.  And that should never happen, but after going through the motions of "me me me", I don't remember what's a healthy way of living with "us" and "we."  Don't get me wrong, I love this man more than I ever thought I'd love someone and I try so hard to do things together, or make decisions that involve him-but there's still a little part of me that's like "if you don't do this yourself, you won't get it done the way it needs to be."  That part then gets overwhelmed because deep down I know it should be a partnership thing and if I do it by myself, it hurts him in the end because he then feels inadequate.  But it's my fault because I don't communicate what it is I need to get done, or when I need to get it done, or the significance of it.