Scary Chickens and Their Frightening Eggs

In what could be a result of my brain injury, seven or eight years ago, or possibly just a result of getting older, I have pretty much stopped remembering my dreams.  I mean, I still remember the frightening dreams that made me so afraid of the dark as a child -- one or two of them quite vividly -- but any dreams that I have now,  are gone within moments of waking.  I can try to hold onto them, and the feeling they gave me may last for half an hour or so, but none of the details.  Even while feeling the feeling, I often cannot identify it in words.  This makes me think it is a result of my brain injury, since I think I have always had words for what I wanted to convey, in my previous life.

However, last night I had a dream that I still recall quite clearly.  And last week I had a dream that I also recall pretty well.  So -- is this me, stepping out of the mists of Brain-Injury-Land, and back into the clear sunlit hill country of Dream Land?  Or is it merely an aberration? 

Last night's dream involved me driving repeatedly over the same terrain, in the first half  of the dream, just to get from place to place, but in the last half, to escape from someone who wanted to take a small child away, and was prepared to kill me to get to him.  I can't remember what relation to me this little boy, named Kenny, was -- but he was small and thin, and white-faced, and very obedient and quiet, which led me to believe he had already had a pretty hard life.  I remember getting out of the car and running into a house that I knew was empty at the moment and hurrying him upstairs into the wife's dressing room, which had a weird little offset closet space behind it, that you couldn't really see unless you knew it was there, and squeezed yourself into this corner to look. I bundled him into it and pushed boxes around him, and put an afghan over his head and told him to sit silently unless he heard my voice tell him to come out.  Then I squeezed out of the closet hidey-hole and got into the dressing room door, as the people who were chasing me for his mother, who wanted him for some evil purpose, burst into the room.  They were going to search that room very carefully, since they had found me in it, and I felt so bad for the tiny boy, hiding and then being found, then I wrenched myself awake.  My heart was pounding very hard.  So hard that for a moment or two I couldn't breathe, and had to throw off the covers or suffocate (I thought).  It took awhile to settle down and beat properly.

Now, on thinking it over, I wonder which came first?  Was I having a frightening dream, which caused my heart to pound, or was I having a heart problem which showed itself by pounding, which caused me to attach a dream to it, as subconcious explanation?  Like dreaming that the police are coming, when it's actually your alarm going off?  It's sort of a which came first, the chicken or the egg.  Only it's the scary chicken or the frightening egg.