I don't actually know if I was crying when I woke up. I was scared and sad, though, and here's why: the airplane crashed. I have crashy airplane dreams more often than I probably should, although it bears mentioning that none of these dreams really occur around travel, and I'd say that over half are dreams with planes crashing while I'm not on them. In general, in those dreams, the plane is crashing into the ground near me, or into something that I care about (ie my sister's apartment or my dad's office building). In last night's dream, I was on this plane that suddenly had to turn around and make a crash landing because, and I quote the flight attendant: the light in one of the engines wasn't working. It wasn't a serious issue--I knew the plane wouldn't burst into flame and become a rolling fireball upon landing, but still, a crash landing isn't every good. When the plane hit the ground, I ended up rolling out of the plane onto the runway. And at the same time we were crashing/landing on this runway, another HUGE plane was taking off. Suddenly, my dad was there and telling us all to duck, and that feeling of the other plane taking off over our heads was so intense, I can almost feel it now. My brother lifted his head up, and the plane clipped him, and my dad started yelling at him, and then I realized I had lost my purse. Apparently, this was the most distressing part of the dream, because that's when I started crying in the dream, hysterically. And that's when I woke up. Very distressing, I tell you. I went to the bathroom after the dream, and sort of lingered there, because I was so distraught.
I have distressing dreams fairly often, though they're not always based on something as trivial as a purse. Probably my number one distressing dream is based around nuclear weapons. I dream about a-bombs all the time. I witness, in the dreams, the mushroom cloud. Once, I was trying to save my sister from the bomb, and she wouldn't leave her apartment without the cats. Naturally, we couldn't find the cats, and I was trying to convince her to get to the shelter and I can't tell you HOW bad this dream was. Other times, I'm in the shelter, but trying to get to the best part of it. Or I'm on the way to the shelter, and I can never seem to reach it. All these dreams have the one thing in common: the mushroom cloud. It's the kind of moment you've seen in movies. Everything goes quiet and the world lights up and we all watch the cloud. And then I freak out. On the whole, these tend to be the most generally traumatic dreams I have. I wake up very uneasy, but I almost never cry, and I almost always go right back to sleep. Sometimes I've checked the sky to make sure it isn't Armageddon, and it never is. That's the nicest moment after those dreams.
I'll tell you, though--I'd rather wake up laughing any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.
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