strange dreams are made of what?

Since I've been back, my bed has been wracked by bizarre dreams, the same in-sleep convulsions that I underwent upon coming back from Thailand. I have a modest size bed, but I wake up with the pillows thrown, flipped at random corners. The heavy comforter is bunched up like a rag. Though dreams in real time do not realistically last past one minute, the scariest dreams are those that feel like years have passed. In one dream, I had a husband, a child, an extended family of friends. When this materialized (it was understood to be, though how it came to be was no matter of question), it came with certain conditions. I was given this family knowing that in a couple of years, they will all be murdered. I loved this dream husband of mine. I dream in detail. My dream child grew up slowly. I gave him haircuts in the kitchen. He had spaceship footed pajamas. On the night of the murder, I hid my dream child under the bed, then changed my mind and told him to lie still with the comforter over him. A man held a gun to my neck. Its coldness was very real. I begged for reversal. Undoing. I heard a click. I expected pain. I opened my eyes. I was staring at an escalator full of people, and I was dressed like an office drone. I had every memory of my former life. They said this was limbo--to remember everything yet suffer in the routine of a life where nothing of the former existed. I remember the marble clicking floors and the metallic bottoms of my heels as I ran to the large wooden door, threw it open, looked at the suited man with horn rimmed frames, and shouted "I want it back!" He shook his head.

In the final sequence, I sat mostly naked with my nightgown lifted up to my chest, sobbing. A man handed me a child I didn't, said, "Go on, take it". The child latched on.

Aside from the terrifying reaffirmation of traditional gender roles, I'm not sure what to make of the ambiguity of the "it" (of "I want IT back"). Perhaps internalized notions of a woman's options. Did I welcome the violence? Did I secretly rejoice? In my limbo state, I saw an alternative life (albeit a dull one), but how different was it from what I experienced in my former life? Did I not essentially perform the same role (assuming my office drone outfit suited a secretary circa 1960s role)? What is this "it" then? To what liberating option do I have to refer back to when neither this office drone life nor the 'Leave it to Beaver' scenario of the former was satisfactory (as the shift revealed)? When even the love I felt for this dream family could be trivialized when pushed into a different place and state? Should we take the post-postmodern approach and say that so long as there is something there, you can't help but reference it, but begin anew, and you create your own system of references. But how do you begin anew? Who was this new child that found its way into my arms? Was it history repeating? If so, where was the assignment of husband, house, the stereotypical middle class bourgeois set up? Why was I alone in an oddly familiar bed? Was this solitude another entrapment or liberation? Both?