For the last three nights, I’ve had nightmares: lots of different dreams invading my sleep time. On Monday night, I dreamt that Mike had a really bad stroke, just like Kristen, only worse. We were out of town and stuck in a city with poor medical facilities. The doctors weren’t allowing me to see him or be in the room with him. By the time they finally said that I could see him, they started bringing me to his room. While walking with the medical people, they described what I would need to do every day to keep him alive. They were talking about cleaning out his food tube and changing his IV bags. I woke up when I realized that this was a really bad stroke and he just wasn’t going to come back to me.

On Tuesday night, Mike and I took an hour and made some fresh baked breakfast cookies before I was able to go back to sleep. I dreamt that my sister Stacey had been in a horrible industrial accident. All of her blood vessels, capillaries, arteries and veins were pulled out of her body in groups like networking cables. They were wrapped around her limbs so she wouldn’t bleed to death. She didn’t like them covering her arms and legs, so she kept unwrapping them. I was worried that she would bleed all over the carpets in my mother’s house in West Valley, but she was my sister, so I was going to let her do whatever she wanted. I woke up when I realized that she was probably going to die from her injuries.

Wednesday night, some obscure comment made by Mike was mangled in my sleep deprived mind. I woke up accusing him of cursing me with a nightmare. I had dreamt that a man was trying to kill me. He tried to shoot at us while we drove the Beetle. Somehow, we got away from him, but we couldn’t go home. He would find us there. We hid in an apartment that I used to live in, but it was pretty empty now. Just a bed to sleep in while we were hiding. The man made his way into the apartment, so I hid in the closet under the dirty clothes and sheets, but he found me. I woke up when I realized that he was going to kill me instead of letting me go.

I’m obviously scared of losing something. Each time, I thought it was going to be fine, but then I came to the final realization that things weren’t fine and everything was lost. I just want the nightmares to go away so I can get a good night’s sleep.