Another nightmare - 2:48AM

It’s now 3:03AM as I lay awake and am unable to get a certain moment out of my head...

Sometimes I have such terrible dreams at night and tonight’s was no exception.

We were at my parents house or at least I think we were. The surrounding was so familiar yet off at the same time. Maybe it was because it looked like it was a mixture between our woods and there’s.

Wherever we were are parents shed is on the property. As a child I had a hardened foam football that was smaller in size to a regular football because it was child like. Half of it was pink and half of it was green in my dream. In reality this small football was two toned but I just can’t remember the exact colors. I just know whatever they were they were neon colors. We still have that little foam football tucked away in a big old brown moving box where all my past outside toys are. Frisbees, footballs, rackets, birdies, baseball bats and gloves, even a volleyball and a boomerang.

In my dream my parents are throwing back and forth one of those tennis balls that stick to the Velcro discs they have strapped to their hands, which I also had as a child. In the interim I am tossing the foam football of the bark of a tree and running to catch it in whatever direction it bounces off from.

Before long mom and dad tell me to put a disc on so I can joy in with them. They then move farther down into the yard as I toss the ball to them.

All I saw was I tossed the ball to mom and dad either went to get or he was going to pick up one of the spare balls but anyway mom and I notice him half hobbling over to the shed which was a close distance to him. Mom and I think he is pulling another joke since he’s always joking around until we watch him fall into the door against it, his one legs slides out from under his body, he grabs the door handle on the way down as he falls to the ground.

At this point mom and I are already running towards him at fast as we can joke or not. As we do he sits himself up and is telling us he’s okay. But his voice is shaky and he sounds like he’s in shock. The right side of his face is drooping and he is shaking uncontrollably. He looks pretty pale in color. I notice he has his hand near his foot and when I look down I can see his right foot is crooked, not terribly so but enough to tell that something is wrong. I immediately tell mom and dad tells us that it’s his ankle and he thinks he might have broken it. He says we need to go to the ER.

I don’t know why but in the dream we had a fridge near the patio but sitting off in the grass and I ran to it as hard as I could. Mom yells to me and asks me what I’m doing and I tell her I’m going to grab an ice pack for on the way to help keep the swelling down.

I wake up. I never know if I get to the fridge, if we make it to the hospital or even if dads ok. All I have now is the assumption that everything turned out okay. And a much as I wish I could redream it to know the ending I don’t want to see it again.

I can’t get my dads face out of head. The right side drooping as if he had just had a stroke, the shaking of his face and his jaw, the look of his foot, his voice and how shock-filled and not like his own it was.

Dreams like these could keep me up all night. When I have something so close that it could be reality it terrifies me. And all I can do it lay awake and stare at the ceiling. My only hope is to fall back into a deep sleep where I don’t enter that dream again.

Now it’s 3:28 AM - and I’m hoping that by getting it out it clears my thoughts enough to fall back asleep

Stay safe out there && as always, I appreciate ya!