Confronting Monsters Part I: It's Starting

Sunday morning I woke up with the memory of dream still clear in my head.

I was in a church, and it seemed that there was a service going on because the pews were full, when in came flying sugbins, swirling overhead and making high-pitched screeching sounds, their mouths with small sharp and jagged teeth randomly snatching people by the head and throwing them away. I remember their burnt red and leathery skin, the long snout and the bat-like wings.

I was scared, but not too scared I think. I had time to run for cover. I folded myself onto one of the steps of stairs so that my back was parallel to one step — that way I didn't stick out and thus couldn't be snatched away by the head. Later on, the blood-curdling pandemonium died down, with the demon dogs having been put to sleep (for some reason, they were laid on the cold marble floor and they were snoring, while everyone tiptoed quietly around them).

So I googled this: demon dogs in dreams. Specifically, demon dogs in church in dreams. Remarkably, again, things came up. Apparently these symbolize fears and stresses, things that antagonize and wear you out. The fact that it happened in Church means that there's a moral dimension to these stresses, and that I've sought refuge in what I have faith in (congratulations, me, that's a call I really like).

My dreams are certainly becoming more and more interesting, but first to address the fears that are haunting me like evil rabid dogs. They are there, and I know what they are, though I've not studied them and their full nature. But I know what they are, which is probably why, in the dream, I was fearful but not completely frightened. I had time to think and hide.

So I decided to confront some of them, and taking R's advice to take on challenges in small manageable doses, I began to clean my home. Start with one thing, he says, or one corner. Good plan, yes?

Sunday night, 11.30 PM, with five cups of coffee in me I began cleaning the coffee table — more specifically, the heap of things that doubled as a coffee table. Then I moved to my closet and cleared more drawers Then I moved to the floor. Wiped it clean with disinfectant, the whole of it. I moved furniture. I cleaned the bed. Dusted off the balcony. Worked on the bathroom. Cleared the countertops of the kitchen. It was 5 AM, and only then, when I was finally confronted with the mountain that could make a molehill of what I had cleaned and organized so far — my notoriously disorganized files — did I stop to think: This can't be what he meant by small doses, could it?

I went to bed, happy that I had, at the very least, showed my inner sugbins some teeth. I slept a deep, dreamless sleep. And I woke up to a clean apartment, the cleanest it's ever been. Monsters: 0. Tara: 1. Yey!