The Stuff Of Dreams Insomnia 1V

After a night of sleeping in short snatches, followed by long periods awake, finally fell heavily asleep at about four-thirty only to have yet another of my "lost" specials.

Once again, somewhere in Holborn with my late husband a shadowy figure in attendance the inevitable turning the wrong way into an unrecognized area leading to asking advice began.  This is a familiar pattern/theme of these nightmares and always leads to increasing fear frustration and panic.

This time, as so often before, every person we met and asked directions from turned out to be a visitor to London and pointed us in the wrong direction as we got further and further lost.

Somehow we ended up in a house with a huge party of people who had apparently rented it for the night,
we were trying to find a room when I found myself alone and struggled through a maze of rooms untill I was suddenly outside surrounded by marsh.

This was full of farm animals, all happily splashing about in water and in the distance I could see the Tower of London.

A passer by told me the best way to get back to Holborn was to "keep travelling East".  Trying to discover how to do that from my watery prison with increasing panic I woke, hot, sweating and full of rage.

I know the human mind is a morass of weird ideas, half-formed thoughts, instincts and memories but really this makes me think I should be in therapy!

Where on earth do these extraordinary dreams stem from and what, if anything, should I glean from them?

Having spent twenty-eight years of my working life in London I felt I knew - at least the areas in which I worked - reasonably well, so just why my dreams/nightmares are full of hitherto unknown places is hard to imagine.

In case anyone should think the answers are plainly to be seen, I should point out that I had these dreams when John was alive too.

I've just read through this and feel that though it might be wiser to scrap it, there was obviously some reason why it felt necessary to set it out in print so, for what it's worth warts and all - read , and shudder!