Your Nightmare Is Everyone's Nightmare: Why Your Spouse's Dramatic Dreams Are Actually Society's Collective Hell
Ever notice how the people closest to us become the most spectacular performers in the theater of emotional neediness? You're lying there, peacefully unconscious, when suddenly the bed beside you transforms into a stage for an impromptu one-person show titled "My Feelings Are More Important Than Your REM Cycle." What follows is the kind of moral pageantry that would make even Shakespeare vomit in his centuries-old mouth.
My husband is a bit of a drama queen. He is needy when he gets sick, very in touch with his feelings, and communicative. I love him, but sometimes he's a bit much. Last week I got COVID. I was in bed for 4 days and he slept in the spare room so that he minimized exposure. Last night he slept in bed with me for the second night back. At 1:00 am he rolls out of bed onto the floor moaning loudly. I thought he was having a heart attack. He gets up and walks into the bathroom and then falls to the floor. I was up now and trying to figure out what to do because all he was doing was moaning. He finally says pour water over him, so I get a cup and pour water over him. I felt him, he was pretty hot. So I figured he got COVID. Then he tells me to put on the shower for him. So I did. He's still laying on the floor not talking. He gets in the shower and then stays for awhile. He finally gets in bed and I was prepared to get him some medicine to bring down the fever....and then he tells me he had a bad dream. This whole drama was all because of a freaking bad dream. Not COVID. Not a heart attack. A bad dream where he was being stabbed repeatedly. To top it all off he fell right back to sleep and I was up for two hours trying to get back to sleep.
Needless to say, I woke up pissed. He felt I wasn't being sensitive to his needs. I've never had a bad dream like that, so maybe I was...but at the same time who does that? Wakes their spouse up in a panic, not communicating, and then complete disregard for their sleeping spouse just hops back into bed like it was no big deal and then gets his feelings hurt because I'm tired and irritated.
A little back story, my dad is a narcissist and frequently did things like this to my mom and us. He would lay down in the middle of the hallway when he was sick and make us walk over him while he moaned in agony. He would throw temper tantrums because he wasn't the center of attention, or he would have angry outbursts and throw things. I had a little PTSD flashback because of what my husband did last night. I'm an officially diagnosed person with PTSD caused during my childhood by my father and have participated in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing therapy. I also take prescription medicine and melatonin to go to sleep and stay asleep. So sleep is an important commodity in my world.
We've been together for 3 years and married for 2. This is not our first marriage. We are in our 50's and have grown children. None of my other relationships had random nightmare drama. So, Am I The Asshole?
Update: after posting this and getting feedback, I let him know about my past experiences with my dad, the fact that I was genuinely debating calling 911, and asked him if he'd done this before. He also knows my sleep troubles so we talked a little about that. He and I really do have a great relationship. I love him. I just didn't know how to respond to this because it's never happened to me before and I was super tired this morning. I even took a nap today, which my doctor says I shouldn't to keep my sleep regular.
I found out that this has happened before about 2 years ago, before we started living together. He says it happens when he's stressed. He and I don't share finances except for home expenses, and he's a freelancer. He's stressing about taxes. I did tell him that we need to see a doctor if this gets any worse just to check if there's anything we can do to alleviate this in the future for him and he needs to talk to me about what's stressing him.
The Existential Shit-Show Analysis
Let's dissect this marital horror show like the rotting carcass of meaning it truly is. A grown man—a creature supposedly evolved enough to pay taxes and operate heavy machinery—experiences a bad dream and responds by hurling himself onto the bathroom floor like a toddler dropped into a bathtub of ice water. The human mind, that supposed pinnacle of evolutionary achievement, reduced to a puddle of primordial goo because his subconscious decided to play a little game of "Let's Pretend We're Being Stabbed."
What we're witnessing here isn't just garden-variety narcissism—it's the fundamental absurdity of human existence concentrated into one midnight bathroom tantrum. Like a particularly depressing episode of "I Love Lucy" directed by Ingmar Bergman while high on existential despair. This man's dramatic flailing is humanity's desperate attempt to matter in a universe that wouldn't notice if our entire species blinked out tomorrow. He's not asking for water; he's begging the cosmos to acknowledge his insignificant pain.
And our protagonist—our long-suffering narrator with her PTSD and medication regimen—what cosmic joke placed her between the twin hells of a narcissistic father and a husband who transforms nightmares into performance art? She's trapped in the endless loop of human connection, that brutal practical joke where we're biologically programmed to seek out the very relationships that will inevitably disappoint us in new and creative ways. Her childhood prepared her for this moment with all the loving care of a slaughterhouse preparing a cow for its "big day."
Did you ever notice how we use the phrase "grown man" as if adulthood somehow confers dignity or wisdom? This middle-aged freelancer—stressed about taxes like every other meaningless speck of consciousness—reverts to infant-level communication when faced with the terror of his own subconscious. And then, like the perfectly calibrated asshole the universe designed him to be, he falls back asleep while his wife stares into the darkness, her prescribed melatonin fighting a losing battle against the adrenaline spike of momentary terror.
The most deliciously fucked-up part? They'll talk it out tomorrow like rational adults. They'll use words like "stress" and "communication" and "doctor," as if these linguistic Band-Aids can cover the gaping existential wound of being conscious meat puppets doomed to hurt each other in the brief flash of light between two infinite darknesses.
The Void Stares Back
What we're left with is a perfect microcosm of marriage: two fundamentally alone creatures grasping at each other in the dark, occasionally waking each other up to share their personal nightmares before rolling over and leaving the other to deal with the fallout. He'll stress about taxes tomorrow; she'll stress about sleep tonight. They'll both die eventually, and the universe won't even shrug.
Their "great relationship" is just mutually agreed-upon delusion, a shared hallucination that allows them to ignore the fundamental emptiness at the core of human connection. Like two prisoners convincing themselves their cell is actually a luxury apartment, they'll continue their dance of neediness and resentment until death mercifully puts an end to the show.
Idiot's Guide to This Shitshow 🤪
Marriage is two selfish animals sharing a bed until death. 💀 Husband had nightmare, acted like he was dying, woke wife up, then fell asleep while she suffered. 😴 Wife got mad because his drama gave her flashbacks to daddy issues. 👨 They "talked it out" like that fixes anything. 🤣 Everyone's needs matter except when they're inconvenient, and we're all just waiting to die anyway. 💩 The end!
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