To sleep: perchance to dream: aye, there’s the rub.

Being a therapist, and good friends with not just one, but TWO world-class dream workers, I am well acquainted with the transformative power of dreams. As a woman who has been grieving, I also am too well acquainted with the power of dreams to disturb and disrupt sleep. How many times can a person be run over by a white van, the dream shifting ever so slightly in whether I see it coming, stand firm, run , or get it from behind as I’m happily pulling weeds in a big garden? Apparently a lot, with even little additions like a hose that comes out and sprays boiling water on me, and a sound system blaring salsa music. Understanding the dream hasn’t made it go away, but I am working in dreamtime to get a vehicle of my own that can simply pass the white van and keep going.

I know these white van dreams, and others like them, are part of the process of integrating loss into my being, are normal ways my unconsciousness is trying to make sense of the what makes absolutely no sense to me in my waking life.

But, I have to sleep. Without it, I lose my ability to function. I can’t listen to clients, and truly want to spend my day curled up in bed, with only the bandwidth of attention needed for bad television. Naps just lead to more dreams, and make sleeping even harder at night.

So, I have to sleep. There’s been lots written on good sleep habits, on making your bed a comfortable and inviting place which you only associate with sleep (not hard in my present circumstance), and drinking warm milk or herbal teas before and the art and practice of winding down.

I got these all covered, and still. The truth is if you have a big loss or huge stressor, it perchance and the perchance is high, will come into dreamland with you. And it will wake you up, again and again.

Alcohol doesn’t help, that just makes it worse, as it assures waking in the middle of night, left to toss and turn with only muddied memories of bad dreams and no hope of going back to sleep. I’ve tried varied herbal sleep formulas, and I can’t say any of them kept back the dreams and kept me asleep.

My sense is that the dreams do need to come. And I need my sleep. So, we juggle, dreamland and I, with a triage approach on what will keep me the most functional. I have a nice white and effective jar of sleeping pills that I know if I take regularly I will end up hooked on. So, I use them only when needed, and no more than three times a week. And I am so grateful for them and their power to give uninterrupted sleep.

The night before last , I woke up bone tired, my heart chakra feeling ripped open by the nightmares I’d dreamed. Trying to make it to a car of my own, as the white van headed towards me, I opened the door of what I thought was a VW and it turned out to be made of beautiful tissue paper – like a Japanese kite. Soar, I started to incant, soar!!!! Epithets cames streaming from the white van as it aimed itself at me. I woke, sweating, the feel of torn tissue paper all around my legs, not sure if I was truly broken from the dreamtime.

Last night, I opened my white jar and embraced better living through chemistry. I slept and even dreamed. This time about the salad variety of mache. I dreamed I had a beautiful packet of seeds and was putting them in the garden and suggesting to Andrea and Bryan, who live below me, that we become mache farmers, that I was sure it was going to catch on and be the next gourmet lettuce.

This is the kind of dream that will help me through my day, and the tenderness and irritability of yesterday is gone. Tonight, I’ll do all my good habits and practices and perhaps and perchance, I’ll have sweet dreams. Sandman, bring me some, please? And barring a sweet dream, how about a really nice Jaguar, Rolls, or Benz that I can jump into?