Does anyone else suffer from nightmares? The heart-pounding, dry throat, tear rending mess that makes you sit up and reach for something, anything to comfort you - and hope that what you find is not the skeletal hand reaching from under the bed?
I’ve struggled with nightmares for as long as I can remember. The worst of them where I can’t quite grasp whether I’m dreaming. I wake up and believe that I’m still there. There’s no release from them, and they’re utterly predictable in their arrival - moments of high stress come hand in hand with the onset of disturbed sleep and horrific imagery in my failed efforts to rest. There is a solution, I’m assured by professionals: stop being stressed.
Great.
I’ll just get on with that small task, shall I?
But this leads me to dreams. Not the restful happy space that comes in place of nightmares, but the dreams of the kind you need to follow, to grasp with everything you have in the hope that one day they may come to fruition. That, for me, is my writing.
I am ridiculously fortunate that when faced with a total breakdown (the only way I can describe the end of my previous career) my partner sat me down and asked what I wanted to do. I had drifted from my undergraduate degree into a career pathway that had been wonderful, inspiring, and fulfilling… until it wasn’t. Until the toxicity and stress from so many aspects of the job took away my delight from the research, the learning, the teaching, the forming of the relationships that had drawn me in. I had ideas about what I could do next. I always have ideas. Ideas that are actionable, on the other hand, is where dreams and reality collide uncomfortably.
I could run a holiday lettings business. I could develop home education resources. I could go into consultancy work. I could retrain myself into programming. I could give it all up and travel the world. I could-
Each and every one of my suggestions, no matter how financially implausible or impractical with young children, was met with the same.
Ok, we’ll make it work. You have my support.
Then finally, after failed efforts at some (ok, all) of my ideas, I really listened to myself. Not what I thought would make a financially savvy move, but what I dreamed of doing. By now, I was working in my partner’s business, doing everything from proofreading to conducting feasibility studies and writing environmental impact reports. Financially, we were making it work - just. And it gave me the space to think. And to write.
Not the writing I had done for a career, pulling together facts and figures and legible arguments. This was the writing I had dreamed of as a child. Dragging the figures of my ever vivid imagination kicking and screaming onto the page. Developing a world of my own to disappear within.
Completing a fiction book and sending it out tentatively into the world has been a turning point for me. Feedback has started trickling in from beta readers, and they have been so supportive and positive, that I have a newfound confidence in my abilities. Whether I go into employment elsewhere, or continue with my writing dream, I know that I have found a way to be centred and at peace. And as my dream has grown and merged with my reality, the nightmares have at long last faded.