Sometimes, one of the hardest parts about being pregnant is how vivid your dreams can be. Personally, my dreams are already significantly vivid (when they leave me thinking that my subconscious is trying to tell me something, I usually remember every detail). Pregnancy dreams tap into your sight, smell, taste, and a slew of your other senses. That's what it seems like anyway. They caught me off guard with my first one and they left me feeling shaken up and in a panic. With my second pregnancy, I thought that I knew what to expect. One dream in particular really caught me by surprise.
In the dream I wasn't pregnant and Thomas and I were just riding through Welch just like we always did every day in the early days of our relationship. We'd hop in the Cobalt and go everywhere, more specifically to Princeton where we'd go to get Chinese food and we'd spend the night together at the Eden Rock Motel. It was small and kind of sketchy, but it was clean and affordable. We ended up spending the night together for the first time in room 25. We were in our own little world and everything felt perfect.
We went back to the motel in the dream because he said he wanted us to be in that place specifically because he had something very important to tell me. I remember feeling that something was off and I thought that he wanted to break up with me. I was terrified and even as I slept, I could feel my heart crumbling. In the dream, I panicked at the thought of him being away from me unless he was going to work like I always did and still do to this very day sometimes.
In the dream, I looked down at my hands and they were trembling and I was trying to prepare myself for the absolute worst. He walked up to me and held my hands. I could feel my eyes stinging because of the tears about to fall from my eyes and roll down my cheeks. That was when he told me that he had cancer and he didn't have much time left. He went on to say that he had less than twelve hours and we could keep track of the time based on checking his blood pressure. Basically, the lower his blood pressure dropped, the closer he was getting to death and there was no telling how rapidly it would fall and there was nothing that anyone could do to stop it.
If you know how I am about Thomas, you'll know how protective I cam be toward him. Sometimes I feel like I can protect him from anything under the right circumstances, I could and would kill for him. This dream was devastating. Throughout the rest of the dream, I just remember frantically wrapping my pink blood pressure cuff around his arm and jamming my stethoscope in my ears as his hair fell from his head like he had already been through chemotherapy. He was changing and declining by the minute. His blood pressure had gotten dangerously low as he drove us to some of the places we had been together. He was oddly peaceful (which was probably for the best. Just like most of the situations we've been through in real life, at least one of us had to stay calm or it would have been a complete disaster).
I woke up panicking of course. I was actually hysterical. I curled up next to him, holding him as tight as I possibly could. My nerves were all over the place and it didn't make things any better when I stumbled upon the cover of Cancer by Twenty-One Pilots a few days later (if you've heard how fucking good but depressing that song is, then you understand). Unfortunately, even the original by My Chemical Romance is much more depressing. Since I have a heavy history with separation anxiety, I was clinging to him a lot more than usual (I did the same thing when we would part ways during my time in nursing school. It was even more severe the time he got mugged a few years ago).
I'm one of those superstitious people that believes in Old Wives Tales where dreams about death and dying are supposed to be bad omens (when I was growing up, dreams about death was often taken as a sign that death was coming or someone in the family was pregnant. Sometimes it was both). Whenever a dream stands out to me, I hop my ass over to Google to try to get to the bottom of it. According to a neat little article that I found on auntyflo.com, this could mean that deep in the back of my mind, I could be feeling like I haven't spent enough time with him. Considering the fact that we were on such a tight crunch in the dream, this article hit the nail on the head. Overall, I am guilty of distancing myself from my loved ones, simply because I've always been a loner. In the end, I quit driving myself crazy with irrational paranoia, and I actually took the time to learn to love and appreciate my husband just a little bit more because tomorrow is never promised to anyone. Whether things are good or bad, I need to cherish him for as long as I possibly can.
