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Chicken dreams

I’ve always remembered my dreams, so it strikes me as pretty crazy when people say they don’t—or worse, they say they don’t dream at all.

My most vividly remembered dream is a reoccurring one. Thankfully, one I have not had since about the age of ten. It was what I called my “sick dream”… a dream I used to have when I was feeling well, particularly when I had a fever.

The dream went something like this: I would be looking down as a passive observer on a giant black conveyer belt. In the distance, the belt met another conveyer belt from above. On the belt below were hundreds of delicate daisy-like flowers, which were slowly being fed into the area where the two belts met.

For some reason this dream was terrifying. It sounds dumb, but I would usually wake up from this dream in a cold sweat. I still don’t really get it. I guess my childhood was so blissfully secure (or so I thought) that the worst nightmare my subconscious could conjure involved flowers meeting their demise.

Anyway, the point of the above reminiscence is to illustrate my malady of reoccurring nightmares.

Another, more current, repeater involves poultry.

I used to keep chickens in my pubescent years. And when I say chickens, I mean a lot of chickens… a serious lot of chickens…

It started out as only a few, but then my mother and I both lacked the stomach to prescribe population control. No chicken ever met the fate that chickens are typically raised for, even the biggest assholes of roosters. Instead, my mom and I would just narrate the chicken drama like most families would probably narrate their own tragedies (it was just the two of us).

It typically went something like this:
Me: “Did you see Colleen today? Oh my god, she’s missing, like, half her feathers!”
Mom: “Really? It was probably that cocky little rooster with the orange tail feathers… he’s much t horny for his own good.”

Also, I guess I didn’t fully realize that chickens lay eggs, like, every day, and you have to gather those eggs on a regular basis. Plus, some chickens are bitches. Those two facts combined led to the bitchy chickens incubating about thirty eggs at a time. Hatching rate and chick survival was about 0.97. Needless to say, we had lots of chickens… a serious lot.

Chickens were fun in the summer when I could set out a big bowl of water and let them outside to pretty much feed themselves everyday. In the winter, they were a pain in the ass. To feed the chickens in winter, I had to trudge a hundred yards through the snow (and typically in the dark after school) and chip out their frozen water dish. Despite the best of efforts, the chickens did not get fed every day. I was pretty terrible poultry caretaker (however, let me interject here that no chicken ever died under my watch of starvation or dehydration. Instead, it was the weasels, but that’s a story for another time…)

So, back to the dream part.

I’ve been having this chicken dream since I started as an undergrad. It’s a bit different every time, but the main theme is neglected chickens. In it, I’m usually opening the door to the old chicken coop expecting to find it as it currently is: empty and dusty. Instead, I find chickens. Chickens I had forgotten I had and had forgotten to feed for years.

Again, this dream is terrifying. I think it represents all my anxiety in life because I usually have the dream when I’m feeling more stressed than normal (a less frequent, but similar dream involves me having forgot to go to my shift at the perfume counter at J.C. Penney’s for the last six years. oops)

Anyhow, the whole reason that I started this particular story is to record how validated I felt yesterday night when I learned that someone else has chicken-anxiety dreams too.

I was talking with one of ADHD’s friends and somehow the topic turned to chickens. Apparently, he too was a junior caretaker of chickens. And he too has nightmares about forgetting to feed the chickens. How weird is that?

Or maybe not… maybe we all have a chicken dream… what’s yours?