Anxiety Dreams

If I were going by perception rather than logic, I’d testify that I don’t normally dream at all. I go to sleep, I wake up. That’s all. Sometimes I wake up with vague odd notions, and often with a very strange song in my head. But vivid dreams? Not often. I accept that everybody dreams and I just don’t wake up soon enough to remember mine, because that’s what I’ve been told so often and there’s no special reason to disbelieve it.

And of course once in a great while I wake up remembering a doozy. While not exactly recurring dreams, a lot of them are quite similar. I assume I have them when I’m feeling anxious about something.

The general set-up: I’m thrust into some situation where I need to shoot something, as Larry Correia puts it, a lot. I have the gun, I have the ammo, and I know what to do. But from there nothing ever goes right.

Usually it’s something to do with the gun. Typically I’ll find cover, get a good stance and sight picture, squeeze the trigger, … and the gun falls to pieces or something. In this case it was more like a problem with me. I was accosted by this big, aggressive, heavily-armed and rather sarcastic person. I drew my gun – he already had his out – but instead of doing anything else right I just sort of poked it out one-handed and yanked the trigger. The gun fired and immediately jammed. The bullet had no effect other than to make my opponent more sarcastic. This happened again and again: I had to clumsily clear two or three jams for every time the gun went bang, and even the bangs never seemed to do any good. It was frustrating.

He was shooting back and wasn’t hurting me, either. This went on for quite some time – I seemed to have quite a lot of magazines – but eventually we both ran out of ammo and just sort of went away from each other.

The really odd thing about the dream was that it went on after that. I remembered precisely, and with a feeling of great shame, all the things I had done wrong. One-handed point shooting? I never do that – I can’t hit shit when I do that. I was poking the gun forward with every shot like Dan Blocker in this old western I saw once. Dirty Harry would have missed shooting a pistol like that. And the jamming was clearly – in my mind – caused by all the limp-wristing. I woke up feeling very stupid.

I really don’t know what that was all about.