12/09/04
Losing Ground

This dream was very vivid and very long while I was having it, and immediately after; I had forgotten to set my alarm and so woke up naturally in the middle of it. I did not take any notes, so it's vague and faded by now, but since it was so repetitive I don't think I'm missing much of importance.

Basically...I somehow discovered that the floor in our house seemed to be collapsing in certain parts. It was daytime, Ma and Dad were both home at various points in the dream, and I just kept wandering around the house over and over looking at these weak spots in the floor. What was happening was there were these big indentations--sinkholes--appearing in our wooden floor, beneath pieces of furniture and such, and it's like the wood was getting ready to give way so all this stuff would crash down into the basement. In real life our house is two stories with a basement; in this dream it was the main floor which was "sinking" in places. There were no actual HOLES in the floor yet--it's like the wood was bending, or warping...the closest description I can give is of something sinking in the sand. You know how a little hollow forms around it as it sinks? Well, even though it's physically impossible, that's what was happening. Pieces of furniture were sinking into the floor, which itself was growing weak, and I knew it was only a matter of time before they crashed through. So far only various spots of the floor were affected but who knew when it would spread?

I spent a great deal of time walking back and forth between the worst of the sinkholes, growing ever more distressed. I seemed to be the only one who really cared about this, for one thing! I kept pointing it out to Ma and Dad, and they knew about it, but only shrugged it off as something to be dealt with in the future, once disaster had already occurred. I just walked and walked and got more upset. Ma was on the ground floor with me but we didn't interact much; she was off doing her own thing while I looked at the sinkholes. There were a lot of them but the two I remember most distinctly were one around the toilet in the main bathroom, and one around my bed. I'm pretty sure there was one around Dad's bed as well, and maybe around such things as the TV stand and the couch. I can't remember them in the other rooms of the house though I'm betting they were there.

I had various scattered thoughts and reactions while doing this. In no particular order--I went into the bathroom with a yardstick to measure the depth of the sinkhole around the toilet. I was too anxious to even make use of the toilet now, lest it crash through if I sat on it. This distressed me since I have a weak bladder! I stuck the yardstick's tip into the hollow and got the measurement, only to realize I had the stick backwards, so I put it back in the right way. At first it was like five inches but then it said it was six inches deep. (The sinkholes were wide and sloped a lot, out from the point of origin, so exact measurement would probably be very difficult seeing as I was trying to measure depth and not diameter or anything. They were just these concave pits forming around everything. One thing I just realized--the bathroom is tiled and not bare hardwood like the living room, or carpeted like the bedrooms, but it seemed more like some kind of golden wood or something in my dream.) I took the measurement because I wanted to prove to Ma and Dad just how serious a problem this really was.

I went into my bedroom and found, to my great dismay, that there was a sinkhole forming around my own bed! I began to cry to myself. I was too afraid to even approach my bed or walk around in my room lest I fall into the basement--throughout this entire dream there was this horrible sense of dread, of exacerbating an already bad situation--of making everything collapse and having it be my fault for not being careful. But I was the only one who seemed to care. I backed out of my room and thought with great anxiety over just how bad these sinkholes might get--would they form ALL OVER the house? Plus I now had nowhere to sleep! I was getting so upset. I considered first sleeping on the couch in the living room while Ma was away at work (she sleeps on it at night; I sleep during the day), but I feared a sinkhole forming around the couch too. I then thought of going to sleep upstairs--in my dream the upstairs was clean and accessible, whereas in real life it's very cluttered with storage boxes--in what was my brother's room; there was kind of a feeling of my brother being at college or away or something, so the room was still his. (In real life, he moved away years ago!) But I had various reasons against that--no bathroom was easily accessible so I'd have to walk all the way back downstairs; my brother might need the room himself; it gets very hot in summer (I didn't think of how cold it gets in winter for some reason); and besides, if the entire ground floor ended up collapsing, I was pretty sure the upstairs would, too! (Though the upstairs floor seemed safer in my dream--almost like a feeling of being up in a plane when an earthquake hits--it's like the only place you ARE safe!) So I had no clue where I was going to sleep! :(

I heard whining drilling noises in the basement, and knew that Dad was down there, working on something. (He drills and such a lot in the basement in real life.) I went down there, seemingly via the porch door rather than the inside door, and set foot in the basement. It wasn't as cluttered and dirty and dim as it is in real life; I looked up into the wooden rafters supporting the ceiling (ground floor) over my head now, and saw places where the various sinks were forming. There seemed to be a big one over near where the pool used to be stored in the basement. I thought, if Dad put his mind to it, he could just take some wooden logs and prop them against the sinks from below, thus averting disaster. What the floor needed was support, and since Dad was down here in the basement, and there was lots of wood around (he carves things), HE could take care of that. The thing was, he was busy with his woodcarving, and I felt that if I bothered him too much he'd get mad and start snapping at me to "stop worrying" about it! No matter how AWFUL the situation really was--I knew he would not care enough to stop what he was doing and fix the sinkholes before it was too late! :(

I think I did mention them to him, briefly, but he showed little concern. I didn't press the point because I didn't want him getting mad at me, but I was so upset. I think I went back upstairs. I think some other drastic solution made its way into my head though I can't recall what it was. The odd thing is that now, I knew that soon we would be moving out of this house--thus the sinkholes here would no longer be a problem. I seemed to be discussing my drastic solution with Ma and at the same time I felt kind of stupid to be wasting time over fixing these holes when we'd be gone soon and they wouldn't matter! I was just worried about the here and NOW. We were moving away LATER. We needed to at least temporarily fix these holes NOW. And I was the only one who understood or cared about that.

I cannot remember the exact catalyst for waking up, as even immediately after awakening, on my own, I had no clue what it was that had snapped me out of the dream--nothing remarkably dramatic or shocking had happened, it was just an entire dream of me walking around looking at sinkholes and worrying! There was no solution, no turning point or anything--even the realization that we were soon moving out of the defective house didn't bring on any relief. But I was VERY glad to be awake! Normally I would not call an anxiety dream such as this a nightmare--but the awful feelings I got were such that this was definitely a nightmare-class dream.

Lots of associations and potential meanings here. Prepare yourself. My parents' reaction to the situation was almost EXACTLY like their real-life reaction to a problem we have with our electricity. In real life some time back, my usage of a space heater in the dining room knocked out the electricity in that part of the house, and ever since it's been very weak and iffy--if you run more than a couple of things at a time out there, the power blows again, and we can no longer use the utility room lights without blowing the power completely. The lights flicker when more than one thing is in use, and this constantly has me worried--because it's going to die out sometime, and we don't have the money needed to fix it. :( So now whenever I see lights flicker in ANY room of the house I get anxious--even though I used the heater only in two rooms (it blew the power out in the other room the first and only time I used it there, but the electricity there hasn't acted up since--we've had flickering lights in OTHER rooms not even affected by the heater). I HATE not knowing how we are going to go about solving a problem, but at the same time, my parents are of the mind that something can't be fixed until it's broken beyond repair--they don't believe in preventative measures, since in all truth we can't afford them. (Though replacing something AFTER it's shot often costs way more!) So of course, this fills me with frustration and anxiety, not knowing how we're going to take care of a problem once it reaches the crisis point. This was illustrated when I asked Dad what would become of the bad electricity in the dining room area, how we would fix it and when. He got very angry and yelled, "WE'LL FIX IT WHEN WE HAVE THE MONEY!" Now Dad NEVER admits to us not having the money to fix something--he's always complaining when Ma doesn't pay bills for lack of money--so to hear him say that upset me greatly. Needless to say, I do not think this electricity will be fixed...until it goes out for good. :(

Dad also has this bad tendency of blaming me entirely for something one moment, then when I get upset, saying it's not my fault. This happened with the electricity, as I had been the one using the heater. (Nobody had told me it would overload the circuits or whatever, and Ma had even been the one to insist on buying it.) When he was angry about it at first he blamed me; at a later point when he was calmed down and I got upset and started crying about it, he told me it wasn't anybody's fault. This tendency of his frustrates and confuses me. I also have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand it IS my fault for using that stupid heater, but on the other, it's their fault for not fixing the electricity before it goes out for good. But on the other hand...etc. The progressively worsening state of the sinkholes in the dream reminded me immediately of this situation.

Another situation this reminded me of, however, was that regarding our computer. In the dream I realized that we would not have to deal with the current house problems since we were going to be moving into a NEW house soon--but the present problems still bothered me. In real life, Ma has laid away a new computer which we can hardly afford, and this was another comparison which I immediately made on awakening. Lately I've been having trouble with our CD burner and this has caused me much frustration and upset since I would like to save my images and files in case of a crash or something. I rather wish we had a better CD burner, one that's more reliable. But at the same time, the new computer will have a CD burner itself, so it would be stupid to invest in a new one for THIS computer. Still, THIS computer is the one I'm using now, so it bothers me. Also, Dad does not know about this new computer yet, although I've been telling Ma to tell him (before she brings it home and it's kind of hard to miss!), preferably when I'm not around so I don't have to hear what he's likely to say! So Dad's reaction regarding the new computer has also been weighing heavily on my mind.

This dream reminds me strongly of "Couch To Basement In One Second Flat!", except it was a lot more widescale than that. But the feelings of fear and anxiety regarding how we would pay for all this potential damage were exactly the same, just stronger. On awakening the pretty obvious symbolic imagery of the dream hit me, too--the thought of the ground falling out from underneath me, and of me having no "support" from my parents (literally, as in the case with Dad in the basement refusing to act to prevent disaster even though it would have been relatively simple to do so)--though I do not know if this is connected to my feelings regarding the electricity and the new computer. Truthfully I don't know WHICH of these, if only one, the dream was dealing with, nor why it was dealing with it now, so of course I am very confused.



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