Dull Dreams

Dreams are today’s answers to tomorrow’s questions.

~Edgar Cayce

My dreams have always been unimaginative, bland, and downright dull. I’ve had dreams of sitting on my couch and scrolling through Instagram. I’ve had dreams of standing in line. Once, I had a dream where I was eating Cheerios — and not even the honey nut kind.

I could probably bore even the most devoted psychologists with my tedious dreams of shopping for towels on Amazon. But I’ve never really minded.

I wasn’t envious of my college roommate, who would wake up in the morning and recount wild and vivid dreams of going back in time. I didn’t feel like I was missing out when my mom told me about exciting dreams where she found herself in a new land, in someone else’s body. And I certainly have never envied my husband’s night terrors.

I always liked that my dreams were boring and practical. My mind’s unexciting, unimaginative images were appreciated in a life that can, too often, be stressful.

Perhaps I appreciated this most when I was a little girl. Maybe most kids dream of Santa and unicorns and candy, but for me a monotonous dream world was refreshing in a childhood filled with extremes.

Back then, I was always traveling between my divorced parents’ houses. I spent most of my time with a doting, loving mother who liked to take me out for ice cream. Then I threw my parental expectations out the window when, every other weekend, I spent time with my angry, aggressive, gun-toting dad. A bland dreamland helped me wipe the slate clean.

And I still appreciated my dull, sleeping subconscious as I got older.

Between the sudden death of a close friend from work, a busy and taxing time in grad school, and the even more stressful experience trying to pay down loans for those grad-school classes, all I wanted to do in my mid-twenties was escape. I wanted to throw myself into a simple dream of brushing my teeth. Or folding laundry. Or cleaning the stove.

I could always depend on a safe, boring dream to give my mind a break — that is, until last year.

It was November, and my husband and I had just packed up our whole life and moved from California to New York. He’d gotten a job offer he couldn’t pass up, with a start date just weeks away. It meant a quick move, frenzied packing, and lots of short goodbyes to our friends, family, and home.

When my husband and I arrived in New York on a cold winter night with our four tightly packed suitcases, we both felt a little lost. We didn’t know our way around or where we could find something to eat. We didn’t even have an apartment, just a two-week reservation for a small Airbnb in Brooklyn.

We were able to find our way to our temporary address, and we unpacked and settled in. But those first few days, we missed our family, friends, and the warm weather back home much more than we thought we would.

Then, more than ever, I wanted a nice, boring dream to ground me. Maybe a short one about washing my hands, followed by another dream where I could find myself sitting on the couch, watching something uninspiring on TV, like a commercial.

But instead, just a few days after moving, I dreamed I was pregnant. In the dream, I was holding a big belly, waiting to feel the baby kick.

I woke up from my dream unlike how I’d ever woken before: sweating, anxious, and exhausted. Maybe I shouldn’t have had such an extreme reaction — it wasn’t as if I’d had a nightmare filled with monsters. But after a week of stressful moving, a weird pregnancy dream was too much. I went into the bathroom and washed my face. I thought that running some cool water would help, but it didn’t.

I’d always depended on my dreams to give me time to relax, not to imagine possibilities. My dreams were supposed to be small, boring moments of my real life, nothing else.

But as I stood there scrubbing my cheeks with the apricot face wash I’d brought from California, I realized that there was something familiar about the dream. It had the same dull feel I was used to.

The vision of me holding my belly had been such a small, quiet moment, just like the dreams of brushing my teeth or curling my hair. Maybe this wasn’t such a wild or fanciful image after all. Maybe, in the madness of the move, I simply hadn’t noticed the first signs of pregnancy. Maybe the dream was just showing me my new normal.

It was a big, exciting moment when, the next evening, my husband and I peeked at my pregnancy test after three long minutes of waiting. We had another big moment a week later when we went into a doctor’s office for a check-up, just to be sure. But that first test, and the dream, were right from the beginning. We were going to have a baby.

My husband and I were so excited for the pregnancy, even though we knew we had some stress ahead of us. We had to worry about finding an apartment, settling into new jobs, and now the health of our growing baby.

In the months that followed, I was especially thankful for my dull dreams, which helped keep me grounded in such a crazy time. But I was even more grateful for that not-so-boring dream that helped me see a new life.

— Jillian Pretzel —