Hooka Dreams

While I love sleeping, I hate going to sleep because I almost always wake up feeling bereft.  I don't have nightmares, usually, but I often have dreams such as these (I was lucky enough to have these over the span of 2 days):
I dreamed of a rabbit and a baby being held over heated iron spikes, and I was told to pick which to save.  I tried to defer, to abdicate, to demur. I did everything I could to not have to pick one.  I wasn't allowed to.  So I saved the rabbit.  The entity which made me choose thundered displeasure about my decision, and all I could think was that I knew the rabbit was innocent but couldn't say the same about the baby.




I dreamed of sitting on a bench, on a seaside vaguely reminiscent of Ocean City's boardwalk.  I was just sitting there, lost in thought when I noticed there was a woman sitting next to me, talking.  She asked me to walk with her, to buy her a slice of pizza, and to wait with her until the sun came up.  Not being a fool, I agreed to her request.  We ate pizza on the sand, sipping 7-Ups while watching a meteor shower, and we saw the dawn approaching.  She looked at me, and I realized she had been crying the entire time we were sitting in the sand.  She placed her cup of 7-Up in the sand, removed her sandals and walked into the ocean.  Just as she was chest deep, she looked back at me and waved.  I think she tried to shout something over the tide, that implacable watery mouth, then she turned to the rising sun and drowned.

I dreamed of living with wolves. They were indomitable and they loved me.  A beautiful winter night, when I could see their voice in the air (because of the thermal imbalances and all that), I knew that I had to kill them.  And they let me.  All of them.  And in that same cold night, as their life steamed out into the cold air, I realized I couldn't see my own breath. 
I dreamed of butterflies that talked to me:  they were scared of the winter-because their wings would freeze, they weren't sure their children would fly like they could, they asked me to call them "flutterbys" without shame.  They walked on me without fear and gave me grace because their generosity wouldn't allow them to do anything else.  I squashed them and ate their shimmering blue wings. 
I woke up after squishing flutterbys and felt so desolate.  That's not the right word.  I felt arid.  Bereft.  Barren. Inhospitable.  Mean. 

During the day,  I don't think of my dreams.  It's only when I'm getting ready to bed down for the night, in a sparsely furnished studio with the AC turned on too high, that I remember the dreams of the previous night.  And I get too scared to go to sleep.  Because I'm worried that my dreams will concoct something more terrible than choice, loss, betrayal.  I'm terrified that I will wake up only to find my dreams were a sanctuary.