A World of What-Ifs

This past week I came down with a virus and had a terrible cough that kept me up half the night. I took nearly everything I could think of to get sleep and nothing seemed to help. I went the traditional NyQuil way for a few nights and experienced my usual cough medicine crazy parallel universe dreams.

I had several dreams this week that were like the Friends episode where all the characters were living the life they could have had mixed with the ghosts of Christmas Past. Rachel was a crazy housewife, Monica never lost the weight from her childhood, and Phoebe was a stressed out business woman.  And I had dreams that involved all three in my own life – so weird.

First, I had a dream that I stuck with the whole corporate marketing thing and it took me to live in NYC where I worked constantly and made lots of cash, but had almost no social life to speak of. I was fulfilled in my professional life, but I had no strong personal relationships. Funny moment in the dream was when I went to work with my hair in curlers (WTH, I don’t even wear curlers in real life) because I was so overworked and tired. It was a little extreme, but it made me think of what-if I had pushed harder when I graduated and dedicated my life to a career.

The second night I had a dream that I married a previous boyfriend. This would have ended in catastrophe in real life, and it certainly did in dream world. The dream was so awful and vivid and I was going through the divorce process. The kicker is that I hired my real husband (who has never had anything to do with a divorce case) to be my attorney. And then we fell madly in love like Harry and Charlotte from SATC, but with less Judaism and body hair.

Then I had the third dream – which was that I never lost my baby weight. Not only had I not lost it, I just looked like I was 9 months pregnant all the time. People kept coming up and touching my belly and congratulating me on my unborn child that didn’t exist. What kind of crazy is this?!

Now that I am feeling better, I can laugh at all of these dreams and remember that I am so happy that my life didn’t work out the way I had planned it to (minus the infinite pregnancy).