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Tommy Hensel

Sparkling Isolation – Day 102

June 28, 2020 //  by Tommy Hensel//  Leave a Comment

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My troublous dreams this night doth make me sad.

Henry VI, Part II, I.ii.22

Shakespeare often says it better than anyone else, as in Gloucester’s line above. Looking back on my musings of the past 101 days, I realize that I haven’t addressed one of the issues that, for me, is kind of the “elephant in the middle of the room.”

Dreams.

At the beginning of the quarantine, I did not notice much of a difference in my sleep patterns or my dreams. I have always had intense dreams – vivid and colorful and quite bizarre in general. So weird dreams are nothing new. 

A few weeks into the quarantine, I began to wake up feeling a bit more tired than I normally would. I was still managing to get at least eight hours of sleep, and the sleep felt restful to me physically, but I would still wake up most days with a general sense of fatigue. At first, I figured it might be because of my inactivity or perhaps too much alcohol or maybe even watching the wrong things on Netflix before going to bed. 

Note – don’t watch anything dystopian about the end of the world during a pandemic. Just saying.

What I have come to realize lately, however, is that my morning fatigue has been the result of disturbing dreams. I don’t recall the specifics of most of my dreams lately, but they have verged on nightmare. Oh, nothing overly dramatic like running from packs of ravening vampires or falling from a great height towards spiky shards of crystal. I have had those in the past, but not lately.

No – these nightmares lately have seemed relatively normal in theme, but overlaying them has been a pervasive sense of doom and fear. I wake up sometimes in the middle of the night from a dream, remembering some of the rather mundane details, but feeling intense anxiety and fear. I have even awakened a few times sweating despite the cool air conditioning in my apartment.

Whatever the specifics actions of the characters in my dreams lately, they all seem to be desperate in some way. People and things in the dreams are often trying to accomplish something that they cannot quite accomplish. Often, they are trying to find something that they cannot find. As a character in my own dreams, I seem lately to be following others and participating in their anxious searches for something undefined.

Many of my traditionally normal dream characters have been notably absent. Lately, I have been dreaming about people and places from my farther distant past. People who have rarely appeared in my dreams are making appearances now, and even though none of them seem sinister or dangerous, I still wake up feeling a sense of dread and fear.

I have recently attempted to program my dream state in advance. I have watched happy, feel-good kind of shows on Netflix, or read uplifting and inspirational things before bed. I hoped that might help. It did not. Last night, for instance, I watched something called “Absurd Planet” on Netflix – funny, short episodes about funky and cool animals, written in a humorous and wacky kind of fashion.

No luck. I still had intense and exhausting dreams again last night. If dreams are about processing deep, subconscious things, then clearly I have a wellspring of drama in my deeper subconscious that needs to work itself out. I just wish I could identify it in a more conscious fashion and face it head on. This nightmarish series of nightmares is wearing me out.

Let’s hope that Sylvia Browne was correct when she wrote, “Nightmares are releases.”

It’s only Quarantine if it comes from the Quarante province of France. Otherwise, it’s just Sparkling Isolation.

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Category: ThoughtsTag: Sparkling Isolation

About Tommy Hensel

Tommy Hensel is the Director of the Fine and Performing Arts Center at Moraine Valley Community College (www.morainevalley.edu/fpac), a position he has held since January 2008. A native of Columbia, South Carolina, he has worked for more than 35 years as a professional actor, singer, stage manager, director, and arts presenter. He holds a B.A. in music and a B.A. in communication from Florida State University and an M.A. in theater from the University of South Carolina. He currently serves as Chair of the Illinois Presenters Network and is a board member of NAPAMA. He served as co-chair of the 2018 Arts Midwest Conference and currently sits on the professional development committees of both NAPAMA and Arts Midwest.

Prior to his move to Chicago, Tommy was an 11-year resident of the Seacoast region of New Hampshire where he served as Executive Director of the Rochester Opera House and sat on several non-profit arts boards. He has served on grant review panels for the New England Foundation for the Arts, New Hampshire Arts Council, Vermont Arts Council, and Illinois Arts Council. During his years as an arts presenter, he has also served on the juried showcase panels for the Arts Midwest Conference and Performing Arts Exchange.

Among his many theater credits, Hensel was the founding artistic director of the Harrisburg Shakespeare Festival (now part of the Gamut Theatre Group in PA). He has over 50 professional directing credits to his name and an extensive resumé as a theatrical performer and cabaret singer. In Chicago, he has a side "gig" as a restaurant reviewer for The Local Tourist website (http://chicago.thelocaltourist.com) and blogs about travel and food at https://www.tableforoneplease.com.

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