Different this time…

I’ve been consumed lately dealing with the VA.  And, my posts have dealt mostly with that.  I haven’t talked much in the past weeks about my issues and nightmares.  The night before last i had a different kind of nightmare.  See, mostly when I dream, I have dreams of being back in Iraq.  I see the faces, smell the smells and hear all the noises.  Hell, I even sweat from the heat.  In the last two years my Iraq dreams have incorporated my current life.  Things and people that I had no knowledge of prior to returning from Iraq now are part of the dreams.  I’ve seen my fiancee’ laid out before me on more than one occasion with multiple amputations, blast wounds and shrapnel.  As unsettling as they have been, they have been the norm for me at night when I look at my eyelids.

Night before last however, I dreamed of all the “unlucky” ones.  All of the ones I couldn’t save.  The ones that God and I fought over.  The ones that didn’t need or deserve to die.  I was surrounded by them.  They were all there looking at me like I had stolen something from them.  All had varying looks of disgust or malice on their faces.  I turned away.  Too ashamed to face them.  I tried, but something in me tells me that I didn’t try hard enough even though I did all I could for them.  With my back toward them, I felt the chill as they came closer.  I felt the presence. I felt the pain they all harbored.

With my back still toward them I began to run.  No matter how hard I ran, I couldn’t escape them though they didn’t seem to walk or run.  They were just always closer to me.  There were no moans that one would associate with the dead.  Just whispers.  Disembodied tones that were not audible in my ears.  They seemed to speak deep inside me.  In a swift yet agonizingly slow movement, they reached out to me and engulfed me in a mass of bony, bloody hands.  I felt myself being sucked into the collective of death and could muster no  energy to escape. and the dimly lit environment of this dream was sucked into a fatal shade of black.

Chris said when she woke me up, I was still running.  It’s been 2 days since the dream and hell, I’m still running.  Nothing has shaken me like that for quite a while.  Last night as I laid my head on the pillow, I begged to whomever in my subconscious would listen to just let me have my regular dream.  I never thought I would ever make such a request.  But in this case the lesser of the two evils is definitely more alluring.