the demons that come out at night

During the days I've been doing pretty well, though I do occasionally get sad when I think of Amalia or imagine what our family life would be like now. I also sometimes feel angry about what wasn't done leading to the birth that could have prevented her death. But at night is when the demons seem to appear. Laying down to go to sleep especially has been an experience filled with a relentless onslaught of images of Amalia's birth, hospital stay and death.

Stress dreams, too, have found their way into my sleep. Last night, for instance, I dreamed that I had ingested glass. My mouth was filled with sharp little shards of glass. I had to take every care to remove the pieces one by one, before any get swallowed. And one did. Another ended up in my eye, piercing it, like the blade of a miniature knife, though I could still see, but not for long, I worried. I then searched around frantically for someone -- anyone -- who would reassure me that glass has the potential of decomposing quickly, practically melting in the throat, doing no damage.

Other stress dreams have mostly focused on natural disasters - usually pertaining to tsunamis or some other type of a flood. I have often had natural disaster dreams over the years. Sometimes my dreams have matched a real natural disaster that ended up occurring simultaneously or a day later somewhere in the world. The only redeeming quality of all this, as I see it, is that if I establish myself as a natural disaster forecaster, a natural hazard psychic of sorts, Tim and I could perhaps capitalize on this some day somehow. Heck, we might even be able to position ourselves strategically in the lucrative field of "shock doctrine economy."