Traveling INFJ

Category: Family

  • A Quiet Nightmare

    A Quiet Nightmare

    “I just want to sleep without dreams.”

    Everyone else in my house is relieved because they’ve waited for this moment all day. It’s time to go to bed. The dogs each receive a honey and banana cookie at bedtime. It’s the dog version of a mint on the pillow. They race ahead of us and get comfortable in their respective sleeping areas, excitedly anticipating their treat. My husband has worked an extra long day and has been waking up in the middle of the night with muscle spasms, so he’s more tired than usual. He can usually fall asleep within minutes of lying down, though. He’s so lucky.

    After we ate dinner, my Dad took himself to his room. He asked to go to the bank soon, but I didn’t want to take him there alone. I haven’t been to this specific bank location yet and don’t enjoy driving him places. I have a phobia of driving, and the anxiety is worse when I have passengers. Ironically, my Dad taught me how to drive back in the day. I learned how to drive in a late 90’s Toyota 4Runner with a manual transmission. He took me up Divisadero Street in San Francisco to teach me how to not roll backwards at stop signs, and that must have scarred me for life. Anyway, I still don’t want to take him to the bank.

    I’m the only living creature who doesn’t want to sleep yet. Or at least I want to sleep but without any dreams. I’ve been engrossed in the same nightmare for days and don’t want to end up there again. It worsens every night, and the next chapter doesn’t seem promising. If I take something with diphenhydramine, then the nightmare won’t happen again. It’s too late, though, because I already drank some wine, which should do the trick alone. Maybe. It hasn’t worked lately, though.

    My husband falls asleep in about five seconds. I lay there for a while, listening to him breathe calmly and peacefully. Kylie, one of our dogs, repositions herself in her crate, making a recognizable sound. Ember is in my closet, sleeping on the floor in her normal spot. I try to relax by listening to the brown noise machine that we turn on every night. I wonder if the nightmare will finally be over, and soon, as I drift off to sleep, the dream returns.

    The house is quiet and dimly lit. It’s not even my house because it’s all on one level. It’s dark in there, with the shadows creating eerie shapes on the walls. I’m immediately uncomfortable, but at least now I don’t have to wonder if the nightmare is done with me yet because it isn’t. In this quiet nightmare, the dogs quietly disappear to their beds as we approach bedtime. One minute, they’re by our side, and the next minute, they’re in another room. They don’t care about bedtime cookies anymore.

    The silence is disconcerting. I can’t hear my husband breathing, or the noise machine, or Kylie making a nest for herself in her crate. It’s like I’m wearing noise-canceling headphones. In this disconnected, dreamlike state, I want to test my nightmare to see if it’s real. Am I here again? I walk into the pantry. I know where it is located in this strange, unfamiliar, yet familiar house. I find a Costco-sized mayonnaise on a shelf and drop it on the floor. It barely makes any sound. There’s hardly a heavy thud that I’d expect. I have confirmation that the nightmare is back.

    Now I feel queasy and a little gross, probably because I drank alcohol before bed, so I want to take a shower. I don’t know why this is what I need to do, but off I go to find the bathroom. I try to call for the dogs to come in with me, but my voice falters, and the words don’t come out. I want them there to protect me, just in case. I want to go into the room where they are, but my feet take me in the opposite direction. I somehow end up in the bathroom taking a shower.

    At some terrifying point, I realized nondescript faces were watching me from outside through the high-mounted bathroom privacy window. It frightened me so much that I tried to call for help. I’m trying to make a noise, but as usual, I can’t speak above a whisper in this nightmare, and nobody is listening anyway. I tear a towel off the hook on the wall and run fearfully down the hallway to where my dogs are. When I walk into their room, they look at me silently but don’t come near me. I’m using body and facial expressions to convey what I want them to do, but I’m not getting a reaction. They stare at me. They stare through me.

    I proceed into another room, the pantry again. I start trying to drop jars of mustard, jam, and cans of beans on the floor. They fall and hit the floor silently. All I want to say now is help. The words can barely escape my lips. I hear an incognizant version of the word, like speaking a foreign unintelligible language. “No, that’s not what I meant,” I think. I try again to say help, and it still comes out garbled. Help is not available here in this quiet nightmare. I sound confused, like my Dad now.

    I try again while I flail about in my quiet, dark house where nobody can hear me at night. I’m standing in a hallway near tears, trying to shout, “Help!” I don’t want to see those nondescript faces again. “HELP!”

    “What?” My husband suddenly mumbles beside me. I’m starting to regain consciousness and wake up from the nightmare. I’m hot like I was running. “What?” my husband says again. He’s barely coherent, but he heard me say something out loud and wants to ensure I’m okay.

    “I said help,” I replied. “It’s a nightmare.” I’m still groggy.

    My husband reaches out beneath the covers and holds my hand, making me feel less alone, which is comforting. It’s a huge relief to be back where I can hear the brown noise, ceiling fan, and snoring dogs. In under a minute, he’s asleep again, though, and I’m alone with my thoughts.

    I cried while trying to process this next chapter of my dream, and the remainder of the night was restless. I lay in bed and emailed myself details from my nightmare because I feared I’d forget them, but you really can’t forget something like calling for help and being unable to vocalize it. My Dad may experience something like this soon but in real life. It’s horrifying.

    I don’t want to fall asleep again because I’m starting to hate this quiet nightmare. It’s exhausting to dread bedtime this way. I want to look forward to sleeping like everyone else does. I feel like I need to plan an Inception-type intervention for tomorrow night. I could plant a pen and paper somewhere in that dark, soundless house, and hopefully, it’ll help my words speak despite all that deafening and unsettling silence.

    I eventually think I’ll use some of the new art supplies I acquired from the JOANN store going out of business sale and paint a “featured image” for this post. I’d like to replace all the photos on my blog posts with either my own photos or my own paintings. Future plans, though.

    Until next time. Thanks for reading!

  • I Wish to Paint

    I Wish to Paint

    Daily writing prompt
    What do you wish you could do more every day?
    View all responses

    My Dad taught me how to paint when I was a child. After his tours in Vietnam, he used the GI Bill to study Fine Art at Berkeley. He felt strongly about art and always wanted to encourage others to pursue it, if not as a career—which is a difficult path—then as a hobby.

    Fortunately, I could blend the creative process with my chosen career path as a Software Engineer. Before moving into Systems Engineering and Management roles, I focused heavily on User Interface design. Knowing how the user uses a given system is as essential as the system being developed and maintained. A software engineer is focused on writing beautifully structured and scalable code and is not nearly as cognizant of whether or not the end-user truly needs a certain feature or if they’ll even understand how to use something that is delivered.

    I found a way to incorporate my experiences with art and design while using another part of my mind to recognize and peer-review high-quality code. The thing is, I still found a gap between the kind of freeing creativity that I sought and the limit of my creativity when building software. I wanted to make stuff that nobody is going to use and complain about, and its existence is meant to be seen aesthetically and serve no other purpose.

    That’s where my painting comes into the equation. I paint for fun, and I paint whatever I feel like painting without input from a customer or other developers. My art exists to allow me to create something out of nothing and distract myself from requirements and rules. My art is stress relief, and the process of creating it offers me unparalleled peace and contentment.

    These are the days when I really wish I could paint more frequently, but everything keeps getting in the way.

  • The Recipe

    The Recipe

    Daily writing prompt.

    What aspects of your cultural heritage are you most proud of or interested in?

    Cultural heritage is an interesting topic now because I’m not biologically related to my elderly Dad, who moved in with us recently. My American parents adopted me in the Philippines while they were there for my Dad’s job as the general manager of a rattan furniture factory. I was an infant when I joined this family as their one and only beloved child.

    After I was adopted, we moved to Thailand, where we were fortunate enough to have household staff who taught me how to count to ten in Thai once I started to speak. I was three or four when my parents finally returned to the United States and settled in the San Francisco Bay Area, where I grew up.

    Being an adopted Filipino has been a unique experience. I don’t look like my parents, and my Dad used to say that’s for the best because I’d probably have his ears. But I always knew I wasn’t their biological child, and even worse, I grew up feeling like I had to explain that to people. When we went on family vacations to Mexico, people would think I was Mexican, and I’d speak up and be like, “Actually, I’m from the Philippines.”

    Back in California, I once got lost at an event. I found my way to the Lost and Found booth and tried to describe my parents. The people in that booth gave me a weird look as if they didn’t believe I could have a tall, Caucasian, bearded Dad. “I’m adopted!” I tried to explain. My Dad found me standing there before I grew more upset.

    The only time in my life when my cultural identification was generally ambiguous was when I lived overseas in Stockholm, Sweden, in my mid-twenties. Nobody made any assumptions that I spoke Tagalog, Spanish, or even English. Everyone would talk to me in Swedish, and then they’d realize I had no idea what they said, nor could I respond appropriately. I tried to speak Swedish, but everyone would change over to English.

    So, to answer the question about what aspects of my cultural heritage I’m most proud of or interested in, I’m pleased to be such a cultural mix that people have difficulty recognizing my culture at first impression. It’s kind of difficult to label me, and I’ve realized with time that it’s a good thing. I’m interested in all the parts that make up my cultural heritage. With the blessing of my adoptive parents, I even traveled back to the Philippines in 2014 to meet my biological Mom and younger siblings there.

    While I’ll always be a proud American, I also feel indebted to a sweet, impoverished woman in the Philippines who knew that she couldn’t take care of me. My future was rooted in her culture and her love for me. She helped stir together a recipe, even though she could never see the final creation. I now know how important family is to Filipinos, and that really gives me something to consider today as I try to help my Dad.