Grrl Power #751 – Dreamescape
I had intended to write this slightly more seriously, then I thought of this and it amused me. Hopefully no one is too upset this session is going in a Sydney-esque direction. Dr. Frost may be able wrangle her back on course on the next page.
Any number of things that Sydney was exposed to on the Alari homeworld could be pretty nightmare inducing. Being along, being lost, being surrounded by death, a planet of silence, fires burning on the horizon as far as you could see, not to mention the giant death machine gunning for you.
I used to have a recurring nightmare about… basically Godzilla, only Godzilla was like five miles tall, and you could see him coming from miles away through the billowing smoke and the burning horizon. It was sort of an impending and unavoidable doom sort of thing, plus there was a factor of being unable to properly register the scale and distance of something that large. There was a sort of Lovecraftian element of skewed perception to it.
Sometimes I think nightmares are scary just because your brain tells you they are, because some of the things I’ve had ‘nightmares’ about aren’t particularly scary, and some of the things I’ve dreamed about that sound scary weren’t remotely frightening in the dream. I had one where I was wandering around my high school, but instead of lockers, there were clear tubes, and all the students had been skinned and their bodies were floating in the tubes. Instead of being scared in the dream, I was walking around looking at all the tubes and thinking about how good the special effects were.
Fortunately I don’t dream much anymore, or if I do I only remember like 3 or 4 dreams a year.
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I’ve been binge-reading manga lately and I started reading this page from right to left. That was confusing O_o
*embarrassed*
It starts making sense about halfway down, though.
Not sure if that’s more or less confusing in the big picture.
Having both a psych degree and having been in the Army, I would say she just isn’t acknowledging everything that shes feeling yet. It isn’t unusual to fixate on a thing like running if it distracts your mind from other scarier things.
Thing is she’s suffering from imposter syndrome or something similar. Notice she didn’t have her orbs in the dream and couldn’t use the alien technology around her thus having to depend solely on her own ability. I don’t have a psyche degree but I was in the Army (reserve) and I started out bombing on my APFT. Even as I got better I would have a similar dream (minus the monsters) where no matter how hard I ran I couldn’t go faster (because I wasn’t actually runing; I was lying down but that’s reality intruding on the dream). As she becomes more capable without her orbs (close-quarters combat training, physical training, etc.) the running nightmare should subside. She’ll still have to deal with the other issues regarding the monsters. Best to try and tackle those NOW when the nightmare is “I don’t have my orbs and have to escape on my own.” Once that nightmare stops becoming regular it will change to “I have my orbs but they aren’t working/sufficient” which will cause a whole new mess of problems. Also, from someone who remembers his initial training making Sydney run after such an ordeal is rather an outlier, especially since she has no prior training. I never went Special Forces or anything like that so I can’t allude to how the more advanced training goes but with her being in basically Basic and Advanced Individual Training they more likely would have let her sleep in and just checked in on her. Mental well being is a bit of a big deal in the military even with the public failures to address it and after the FTX which is the closest her being stranded comes to a training exercise it was the norm that the company slept late after returning to the barracks and the only people who had to wake up before the designated hour were the fire guard.
Well, at least she does not have the one where four guys are willing to shoot each other through you as long as they shoot you in the process.
That nightmare sucks.
having neither of those things, I thought that was kind of evident to even the lay-person?
I think the big spaceship represents a giant cigar
Such a typically Sydney thing to have bad dreams about. It’s not quite consistent with the shield and air orbs while she slept, though.
She strapped the balls to her hands because that’s what she expected to happen, instead, her nightmare was about running
Your mind likes to play tricks on you, like making you think you are reading siht backwards
She expected to dream about fighting and wanted a non PewPew orb to be in her hand for that. Those are the SAFE orbs she was holding.
No, she expected to be attacked while she slept, and Mr Buble and the AirBall would ensure she was still alive when she woke up, instead, she ended up having a nightmare about running and wasn’t able to sleep, or at least not get a restful sleep
I wonder if she was worried that getting off the planet and getting back to Earth was the dream and that letting go of the orbs would leave her vulnerable when she snapped back to reality/woke up still in space.
That’s… a possibility: she thought she was still dreaming and was afraid she would wake up vulnerable (or worse) back on Alari Prime
Do you take suggestions? I just a great idea for how to help Sydney deal with it all. I’d love to share it with you.
As a general case, writers have too many ideas, rather than too few. Dave is always having to walk a tightrope of reader interest, ratcheting up and releasing different tensions at different times in order to proper the reader forward. He does read the comments, though, and we often speculate about what might happen next.
Feel free to put it here, and we’ll all enjoy your idea. Most likely Dave won’t use it, though.
Thats cool and probably a lot unsettling. I’m lucky to have nightmares more easily distinguishable from reality. My favourite was from when I was a wee lad, and I dreamt about having to bring in the woven carpets that were hanging out to dry, because there was a thunderstorm. And as I turned the corner of the house, I saw Mickey Mouse affixing lightnings to the carpets, which angered me greatly, because I couldn’t bring in carpets with lightning bolts on them, as if one touch a lightning bolt one turns into a charred skeleton.
I woke up wanting to give Mickey a punch in the face.
So nightmares about running and first thing in the morning its running… Weird she doesn’t dream about Peggy.
Actually, the Giant Aliens, substituted for Peggy.
Peggy: “Nightmares again?”
Sydney: “Yep”
Peggy: “I’m no psych, but if you want to talk about it…”
Sydney: “Thanks, but it’s awkward enough without having to dance around some ‘I dreamed about you’ comedy routine.”
*Peggy takes this in good humor, Sydney realizes what she just said*
Cue Sydney flailing about as she tries to explain that it was a nightmare, not that kind of dream…not that Peggy’s nightmarish…it was just running alongside her…in fear of the giant monsters, not romantically, only it felt like [Sydney] didn’t have anything below the knees…you know, classic “stop explaining” routine.
Last time I had, which is rare, and also was last night, what’s this freaky combination of original series Star Trek and Barbarella or Logan’s Run, involving trains and rooms with traps built about weird people’s. If you “Fell from Grace” you died in a horrible trap or were sacrificed, or you were “ascended” which only moved you to the next room or environment. A lot of traps were just like wrong door sort of situations, the one on remembering what is this weird fashion show style room bunch of people gathered around the catwalk and there were models that were stiff walking along very short path people would have or all what if they didn’t like what you were wearing you walked around the catwalk fell into a pit that slid you into the center and you were killed by other spiked hydraulic press that would cover everyone in blood. Turned out the person that was running it had some sort of telepathic or telekinetic power that forced people to walk it and then he would throw the lever Crush the undesirable. Apparently had the last piece required to reconnect this small underground civilization to the rest, which essentially had gone feral in only three generations.
I was playing D&D the night before, and it didn’t have any of this shit.
Does anyone else suspect the doctor is not human? Just… something about her face, and the necklace, seems off to me.
My guess is she’s a super. Normal people are not that ridiculously attractive.
My guess is that she is a comic strip Character.
Olivia is also that attractive.
Zack Tilly: just because all supers are ridiculously attractive, not all ridiculously attractive people are super
I’m impressed at Sydney’s vocabulary. “Illithid” is one thing for a sci-fi geek, but “nacelles”?
Star Trek. Warp drive nacelles have been part of the lingo for decades.
The engined of the Enterprise (in Star Trek: Enterprise) are on nacelles. I’d be more surprised if she didn’t know what they were, tbh.
*sigh*
The nacelles house the warp field coils.
The impulse engines are on the back of the saucer section, or in the case of the NX-01, the structure supporting the nacelle struts.
Owa… tagi… kyam….
Is a term you hear a lot in Star Trek. Among other sci-fi. But especially Star Trek.
Sydney is a massive nerd. Nerds tend to be quite a bit better educated than you would thing when you first meet them in my experience. You think you’re talking to someone who’s a bit vapid and doesn’t really care about anything but comics and sci-fi shows and D&D then out of the blue they calculate your gas mileage to 3 decimal points in their head quicker than you can punch it into your calculator.
Frankly it wouldn’t surprise me in the least to find out she has a full college education and possibly even a post-grad degree of some sort. Well, OK, the post-grad degree would be a bit unlikely given her age and severe ADHD. She probably has the intelligence to have finished a degree quickly, but ADHD brains and traditional classrooms or college lectures REALLY do not mix well (speaking from personal experience). ADHD drugs help, but they don’t completely mitigate the difficulties. Though I am told they’ve gotten a lot better since I decided I was better off without them.
I learned a heckuva lot more physics from sci fi books than I ever did by taking a physics class. But I did get details & math in class that are glossed over in a ripping yarn like Niven/Pournelle’s Footfall and other classics.
“Nacelles” are inseparatingly melded with “warp-drive” in my recollections. Due to massive Star Trek exposure it always was that way first, and more conventional meaning of the term later.
“Illithid” is far, far more surprising to hear from a sci-fi geek, if you catch my flu…
Depends on whether they’re also familiar with Lovecraft, I suppose.
Except she clearly plays tabletop RPGs, as literally illustrated in the opening scenes of the comic waaaay back when, and the mother-of-all- of them is not just dragons, but Dungeons & Dragons, wherein mindflayers were also named Illithids (no doubt for novelization & copyright reasons, but also because they needed a name for their own species that wasn’t some racially biased version of “squidface” or “brainsucker” (they are thought-suckers, thankyewverrrrymuch)).
Frankly, I don’t see what’s the least bit confusing about a sci-fi geek also being a fantasy geek. I grew up watching ST:TOS and reading the LotR trilogy (The Hobbit is better), the original Shannara stories, the novels of the Darkover universe, the clearly-reads-like-fantasy-for-many-of-the-books-but-was-claimed-to-be-science-fiction Dragonriders of Pern stuff, on and on and on. Alan Dean Foster (one of my favorite authors) had both his science fiction universe of the Flinx & Pip series, and the Spellsinger universe with whole hosts of anthropomorphic animals being treated as people long before “furry” became a widespread phenomenon in fandom. It was ALL considered “speculative fiction” at the beginning, and only in recent decades did the two (and more) genres diverge and divide and compartmentalize.
Frankly I’d find it weirder that a sci-fi geek WOULDN’T know at least the bare basics of Lovecraftian anything. It’d be like a non-geek person living in Western society but somehow not knowing what a unicorn is. (It’s one of the standard-bearers of the full coat of arms of England, it’s in medieval stories all about virgins being used for bait, it’s frikkin’ all over the place–how can you NOT know what a unicorn is??) I’ll give non-geeks a pass not not knowing much about Lovecraft, or Robotech, or …well, they don’t have any excuse about Lord of the Rings anymore, but a geek, even if it’s not their usual genre, WOULD KNOW.
It’s like living anyplace warm and dry in North America and “not knowing” what a rattlesnake sounds like. (Only cooler and less lethal. Unless you’re a character actually IN a Lovecraftian universe, yeek.)
Not confusing per se, but – from personal experience – not so long ago fantasy (D&D) and sci-fi (GURPS and such) crowds were almost not-intersecting stratas in my area. In fact, people brought up on Simak and Asimov were predisposed to shun and outright reject even a notion of possible fantasy-themed discussions. Yes, even about LoTR.
There were possible exceptions, I guess, where the thing in question could be strictly linked and categorized as “sci-fi” – like Pern, Lord of Light, or Ekumen – but that’s it.
Analogous attitude was a default setting on the other side too, with outright rejection of “Creatures of Light and Darkness” despite it being purely a fantasy novel without anything but most superficial links to sci-fi, for example.
Hence me using the wording I used.
With emphasis on “more” instead of “surprising”.
As for illithids – HPL never used that word, to my recollections, so even the most die-hard HPL fan (in ontological vacuum) would be either baffled by the term, or just would assume that it’s something mentioned by HPL offhandedly in some god-forsaken note on cooking receipt for random blasphemous butterscotch biscuits; or a random bullshite nonsense “invented” by the dreaded Derleth.
Mind you – HPL is explicitly not a fantasy author in traditional sense: his body of work is a pure sci-fi of varying hardness, richly coated with poetic approach and purple literarycisms.
Yes, even the Dreamlands cycle.
That his works are now seen as fantasy ones, is a symptom of an inevitable deepening of Humanity’s understanding of the Universe, and several radical paradigm shifts in scientific worldview. The Science Is Marching On, in other words.
Still, even with Dreamlands relegated to the realms of fantasy, the Mythos texts are nothing but sci-fi, through and through.
The three general divisions of speculative fiction are scifi, horror and fantasy. There are, of course, cross-pollinationed subgenres like time travel romance, urban fantasy (erotic romance with sexy horror and fantasy creatures, set in modern urban times), and so on.
Oh, and alternate history, and mil scifi. How could I not say mil scifi?
Those parts of the Warp-drive, sticking about the ship body, were nacelles.
A nacelle is a housing separate from the fuselage.
You see the term a lot for esoteric aircraft.
The WWII era Lockheed P38 Lightning and the Vietnam era OVA1 Bronco had twin fuselages, with the cockpit in a nacelle suspended between them. The engine compartments on struts which hold the engines on some passenger jets below and slightly forward of the wings, those are nacelles.
Because Sidney has scuba cert, I’d think that she loves swimming. So I’d recommend she does laps in a pool for the cardio portion of her PT. STILL doing some running tho, just a much shorter portion focused on teaching her proper form until the nightmares go away. Knowing which muscles to move when makes running so much better.
Running is always relevant.
Silent Running is Dern relevant.
Uggh. Nightmares. There is a general solution–you can teach yourself to be in control during dreams. Mine was being a fly stuck in the corner pocket of a pool table. Once I figured out I could fly out–nightmares have been EXTREMELY rare. It’s called “lucid dreaming.”
DaveB I actually don’t think the session going “Sydney-esque” is bad. It rang so true with my own therapy sessions when I’ve tried to be funny when I get to something about which I’m scared or angry or hurt. It’s like a nervous laugh- kind of self defense. In this page, Sydney says that the running is the only bad part of her nightmare. However, it’s clear enough that she’s been feeling alone, afraid, and mortal.
tldr; Sydney’s humor makes her feelings more real to me.
Yeah, it is both amusingly Sydney-esque and VERY much feels like a coping strategy. That said, I feel like this particular therapist hasn’t had a massive amount of recent experience with Sydney level ADHD cases, so this could go round for a bit…
I have had only one dream that has stuck with me for over 70 years and that was one when I was 4 years old. In the dream, I was in a city but the city was dead nothing but walls and rubble; it was also a maze. It was also like a dust storm blowing a cloud of red dust making things hard to see at times, it was also dim as though the sun was, completely obscured. Then I saw something landing in what looked like some sort of spaceship and beings coming out and then chasing me throughout the maze. I finally get away from them and open a door where I see my wife and child in a beautifully furnished room rich in wood and looks out a very large picture window onto a mountain range of green trees. Now at 4 years old I do not have any younger siblings and had never been to a mountain range. Lived in Kansas a place so flat that I do remember the waving fields of grain. Living on a farm that we had a hand pump for water and no indoor plumbing, think outhouse, ha good times well at least for little boys. This is the only clear in color dream that I remember through all this time and I still wonder what the heck, and where did I get those images to think of at the age of 4. Oh, I also had the emotion of fear, love, and wonderment.
We bought a house in Pawnee county in 1969. My great grandmother came for a visit, and asked my mom (her granddaughter) where the outhouse was, so she told her. “I thought it looked like it hadn’t been used for a while!”
So where in Kansas did you grow up?
Any time I’m super stressed at work I have nearly the same dream telling me that I’m out of control…
I’m the only one in the backseat of a car going down a steep hill with lots of crossing streets and some even more dangerous situation at the bottom.
I have only had one nightmare. And it was about working at Starbucks. Okay, admittedly I was working at Starbucks at the time, but I’d just started working the coffee bar, and it’s harder than it looks.
So in the dream, I was pulling drinks by myself at the coffee bar, and the drinks start coming faster and faster. Cups are lining up. And in the dream, I was getting confused about the recipes involved, and then I wasn’t pulling the espresso shots right, and it started getting faster and faster and faster and…
I woke up, gasping, heart pounding, covered in sweat, blinking rapidly… and then I burst out laughing until tears fell down my face, because I thought it was so ridiculous to have a nightmare about a bloody Starbucks.
I respect people who have to deal with nightmares. I have my own problems, but thankfully nightmares aren’t one of them.
The classic dream about the stressful work situations. Reminds me of when I worked in retail. I dreamed about a never ending line of trucks dumping never ending deliveries on me.
That, and the “Going to work naked” dream are pretty common (I mean the “work is piling up and I can’t catch up to it” dream, not one specifically about starbucks.
That’s a video game, right?
My thankfully rare nightmares tend to be dinosaur related. I’ve had a few not be, and only one of those be about somthing happening irl, but they all suck.
Fortunatly, the few I can remember that have happened recently have been very nice. Granted, I fell asleep twice in the most recent (I had been really tired that particular night) but I told the person I was with in the dream about it the moment I woke up because It was so nice, and I really hope the old wive’s tale of “don’t tell people about your dreams before you eat or it will come true” actually works.
But yeah. 99.9% if my nightmares? Dinos. Mostly being chased by them, but the format has been changing recently.
I would not be worried that this is funny at all. We do not get to actively select what part of our traumas we focus on as triggers. I had a series of nightmares about walking outside without shoes, absolutely terrifying. It also means that I almost never walk around without at least some slippers. Sigh.
I used to dream about fire alarms. I would be somewhere, anywhere, and one would go off and I had to run away cause it would chase after me andgrow fangs and try to eat me by jumping onto my back and gnawin away…then I confronted it one night…stood up to it. And embraced it. One good hug. And I have never had them again.
When you have a running nightmare it usually involves the feeling of running through something that slows you down. At least in my nightmares. Suddenly I can’t run any faster than a walk and my legs feel like they are hip deep in wet concrete.
The scariest thing about giant monsters, that no one ever thinks about, is how fast they are. Most large monsters are depicted as slow and lumbering but that is just cause we are seeing them from a human to human perspective. It might take Godzilla 5 seconds to take a single step, bit in that step they could cover 500 meters or more.
+2
Actually, sydney may have revealed her problem right there. The problem with trying to side track therapy with sarcasm and the like is you often end up drawing attention to the issue instead of away from it.
If I had to guess, sydney’s nightmares are caused by the feeling of powerlessness. While she was able to fight those monsters and the space ships, there were a few instances during the fight where she was left feeling powerless in a life or death scenario, when she would have felt invincible before. When she got hit with one of the spines (only to be protected by her armor which she had forgotten about) and when she tried to escape, only to realize she wasn’t fast enough to actually escape. Then she gets to the hub world only to realize that all her powers and she is still stranded and isolated.
Her focusing on the running being the nightmare highlights this as it’s something she generally shouldn’t ‘have’ to do since she can fly.
The thing that hit her was a piece of shrapnel from an explosion. A rock moving much faster than was safe. Not a part of the monster. if it had connected with her face she would not be in the same condition she is now.
Ugg that went a weird place…
Any time I’m super stressed at work I have nearly the same dream telling me that I’m out of control…
I’m the only one in the backseat of a car going down a steep hill with lots of crossing streets and some even more dangerous situation at the bottom.
Wait, is the Doc writing something down, or scratching out something she had already written down?
The *SCRATCHSCRATCHSCRATCH* kinda implies the latter…
“Even the THERAPIST doesn’t know what to do with her!”
Isn’t that usually the reason why therapies take as long as it takes for the problem to go away on its own?
Therapists are just really expensive rubber ducks, instead of talking out things to order your mind she encourages you to do so and guides with questions in ways to help you discover the “truths” you need to.
Really good ones can get you to placebo yourself.
Licensed ones can know if and when drug therapy may be required to help adjust the messed up hormones.
Trained, licensed therapists are better than rubber ducks because they can ask questions that rubber ducks literally cannot. Sometimes the questions don’t lead to productive thoughts, but sometimes they do, and that makes the expense worthwhile.
But, yes, sometimes all you really need is a really good-listener quality rubber duck to talk your problems at, so you can think things through and hopefully find the solution.
A really thorough therapist can get you to see things about yourself which you have had to train yourself to not see, when you have lashed out at everyone else who mentioned it for decades.
Heh. My 2 cents about running nightmares. Real life- waking up to a charlie horse or two that won’t go away for 10 minutes or more. Strangely calling 911 actually got it to relax. :P
There is a reason why I eat two bananas a week now.
If you can get it, try NUUN, a tablet that dissolves in water, sweetened with stevia and loaded with electrolytes. (And it comes in several flavors.) Half a tablet for 8oz (250ml, give or take), break it in half to fit it into a half-liter water bottle, etc. I have charlie horse issues (never ever take ciprofloxacin unless it’s absolute dead-last on the antibiotic spectrum) in my legs and feet, but drinking a tablet’s worth a day has helped immensely. And since it’s sweetened with stevia, it’s diabetics-compatible. (Also the grape flavor tastes like real grape and not artificial crap, but don’t expect it to be purple!)
Stevia is crap, they are trying to push it as a natural alternative to sugar (ignoring the fact that sugar is a natural product :rolleyes: ), and it tastes worse than high fructose corn syrup (the NA alternative to cane sugar)
100% agree. Some nightmares are just scary because your brain tells you they are. I’ve liked to prattle endlessly about my dreams since childhood, and most of them were of the “someone is trying to kill you” variety, but every once in a while, something different would come along. I was quite young when it happened, but one nightmare I had was about a bagel, turning in a microwave. Literally nothing but that. I woke up screaming.
A bagel in a microwave? What kind of meshuga would commit such an act? Oy Gevalt!
Maybe that’s why it was a nightmare?
The thing is dreams in general don’t make sense – they are not SUPPOSED to make sense – and they only seem to when you are already waking up and trying to put them together and forgetting them at same time. So, you may remember the dream was scary but not WHY, and if you remembered why it was supposed to be scary you might not understand why it was scary anyway.
I had several nightmares where I was running without any idea why, but it was important. Probably something was chasing me?
I have pretty mundane nightmares. I dream about running out of money and getting into minor car accidents and not being able to pay for repairs. Oddly, my *non*-nightmare dreams tend to be very cinematic and grandiose, often involving intricate stories where I’m an observer instead of being directly involved in any way.
Heh, same here: often have dreams about movies or TV shows that don’t exist, start off as just an observer (the camera) butt slowly integrate into and become part of the show
What makes it a nightmare for me, is when people in the dream know me, because in real life, hardly know anyone
Lay off the weed and you’ll start dreaming again. =P
After about 40 years the nightmares are mostly gone but they got a surge after I got murdered with a truck in 2001 (long story covered on a special page in my blog) because now I had a new subject for the nightmares. But yeah, if not treated for the trauma shortly after the incident you get lots of nightmares.
I seem to have problems, at least different ones than other posters. My reaction to the strip was to remember the Marine Corps hymn… “Yeah tho I walk thru the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil, for I am the meanist son of a bitch in the whole damn valley.”
But no, Sydney is not in denial. She is naively open about things. Repression is just not her thing.
Yeah, getting that vibe as well
Dave, an edit is needed:
Any number of things that Sydney was exposed to on the Alari homeworld could be pretty nightmare inducing. Being along, being lost, being surrounded by death, a planet of silence, fires burning on the horizon as far as you could see, not to mention the giant death machine gunning for you.
Being *alone,
LOL! So basically, Sydney is having nightmares about Peggy. :-)
A small quibble about the hair of our Good Dr. Frost.
If she just stopped coloring it and is letting it grow out, then the distance from the root to the color change should be the same length all over. The hair combed over the head from the part has twice as much brown growth as the hair on the side of her head. The only way for the line to be even on both sides of her head is to have done it that way on purpose.
Alt: Her hair does not grow entirely evenly.
Which would make her… perfectly human
Alt 2: Dr Frost is not a super… but her hair is.
Like a Hell Toupee? o_O
Looks to me like a style statement rather than a “I stopped coloring my hair three months ago”.
So far I see a lot of assumptions that Sydney, and everyone else ever, has a standard template of what bothers them and what doesn’t, of how they process traumatic events, etc.
“Well Sydney must have X and Y and Z issues with what happened, and if she’s not talking about that yet, then she’s hiding it, maybe even from herself”.
My experience with psychology and therapy is that there’s a LOT of that counter-productive effort to cram everyone’s experience into a single universal template, a lot of trying to make the evidence fit the theory.
You mean everyone isn’t identical? How strange. :)
I love the design of those heels, where do you come up with the design for the footwear you draw Dave?
His closet (his wife has to store her shoes somewhere)
So Dave, a while back (#467) Sydney went on a tangent about a pitch meeting for a show. Well it seems one of the currently airing anime this season is basically CSI:fairyland. It’s called Cop Craft. first episode is out and it is fairly serious in tone. seems to be a buddy cop setup with a heard nosed jaded detective being partnered with an arrogant fairy knight.
Wait, is that the one with Will Smith? Thought it had a different name
It wouldn’t be Sydney relating the events if it wasn’t done in that distinctivelyscattered Sydney style. Sure, there’s some> humour, but it’s still clearly a traumatic experience for her.
I am amazed no one has noticed this yet, especially given how often people notice mistakes in Dave’s art. In panel 3, the therapists skirt hem is below the knees. In panels 6 and 7 the hem is above the knees! Consistency Dave?
I honestly haven’t had a nightmare of any consequence since I learned lucid dreaming back in the 80’s. It’s kind of hard to get scared of a nightmare when you’re aware you’re dreaming and can wake any time you want.
My brain still tries to scare me with one once in a while, but I’m just, meh, can we get back to the flying dream?
For the record, psychiatrists don’t do therapy, they make a diagnosis and prescribe medication. They then see the client once every 6 months or so to monitor their progress. A psychiatrist may refer a client to a therapist in addition to, or instead of, a prescription. Psychologists, on the other hand, will do therapy. They will see a client once a week or so to help them work out their problems.
I guess she’s writing down…”hopeless” or “lost cause” or maybe both???
“Recommendation #1:Reassign to less stressful duty”
“Recommendation #2:Honorable medical discharge”
“Recommendation #3:Permanent KP duty(or desk duty-whichever is most preferable…)”
I imagine it’s something along the lines of “In denial about trauma, compensating with bravado, possibly delusional.”
Wait…. Nightmares, plural?
She’s slept what, one time since she got rescued? maybe twice? how many running nightmares could she possibly have had at this point?
Depends on how often she woke up between the nightmares
I used to have 1-3 nightmares at a stretch, and one night as many as 5, which was NOT fun.
Eventually I learned some tricks to help. One is lucid dreaming (becoming aware that I am actually dreaming). The other, more useful technique is directed dreaming (taking control of my dreams and making things happen how *I* want them to happen…even if it means rewinding the dream and “starting again” to “steer” it in a different direction.
I must be a bit odd– because when I’m having a dream I don’t like, a part of me says “I do not like this dream. I think I’ll wake up now.” and *click*– I’m awake.
The downside is I remember the dream very vividly for awhile. Some of them leave me looking suspiciously at my subconscious, and wondering what the heck it’s up to.
Sounds perfectly normal to me
Before I realised what career I wanted to get into, I used to have stress induced nightmares about going back to school as an adult (but my actual old schools, not just going somewhere everyone was adults) to complete my learning (high school dropout with various tertiary studies under my belt)
Now I just have stress induced nightmares about getting into yelling/rage arguments with my parents. The weird thing about either types of dreams is that they were never… scary. So originally I didnt think of them as nightmares. Just “weird dreams”. So I can empathize with Sydney. It’s hard to tell when fear isnt the biggest emotion in your dream.