You know that feeling when you wake up absolutely furious with someone for something they did in a dream?
Welcome to my morning.
Last night, I dreamt that I was still together with an ex-boyfriend of mine, and that he was having a very blatant affair with a guy, who, in real life, had been a consistent thorn in the side of our courtship. The dream was incredibly vivid, with me getting angrier and angrier, and my ex aggressively denying any allegations of infidelity while simultaneously nuzzling up to other dude.
I popped awake in the foulest of moods, but I did my best to let go of the malevolent emotions. “It was just a dream,” I told myself. “Your subconscious is just effing with you.”
It was still dark out, and it was a couple of hours before I had to get up and accomplish anything, so I grabbed my phone, determined to distract myself with social media until I was feeling a little less murderous. Opening Instagram, I glanced at the first post in my feed, took a moment to digest it, then set my phone back down and was like, “Welp. My ex is now in a relationship with that guy.”
Needless to say, my outlook on the day has not improved. But on the upside, my useless X-Man powers are as honed and unstable as ever. Which is not as comforting as it could be.
I guess it’s better to receive this kind of information via psychic download versus, say, a mutual friend accidentally spilling the conjugal beans. (And since there are mutual friends involved, I assume at least a few of them have been concentrating on keeping their mouths shut.) But honestly, I’d much rather be psychic in a party trick kind of way: Like, I want to attend elegant dinners and keep everyone delightfully astonished by casually reading their minds and telling their fortunes.
Instead, my prodigal sixth sense is just like, “Hiya! Here’s some brutal truth that doesn’t do you any good and reminds you of all the times you fell for dishonesty and will ultimately cause you to trust any potential love interest even less than you already do. Have fun chewing on that.”
I’m going to be grumpy about this for a while, folks. But you probably already knew that.
The only visible bit of silver lining here comes from Greek mythology. According to Homer, the god Morpheus sends dreams out into the world through two different gates: Dreams that pass through the gate made of ivory are fanciful or deceitful, whereas dreams that pass through the gate made of horn tell the truth.
If I’m currently dreaming true, then it stands to reason that I should be able to channel Ονειροι into divination, invoking Morpheus when working with, say, the Anatomy of a Witch Oracle to get more accurate readings. In fact, now that I think about it, that deck actually has a Dream card, which I’ve always loved, on account of it looks exactly like Tybalt taking a nap with his cat.
With some practice and some luck, directing messages from Morpheus into the cards might make the whole prognosticator schtick a little easier to tolerate. If anything, I’ll get answers when I ask for them, versus having them shanked into my head without warning.
And if this results in the psychic dreams ending for good, I am perfectly content to live without them. If only because old-fashioned, non-clairvoyant nocturnal hallucinations are up there with lifelong bachelorhood as the bumpers of my comfort zone.
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