It has been since I last bought yarn!

Wednesday, April 4, 2007

Knit One, Scream Two

You know you're obsessed with knitting when you dream about it, or in my case, have nightmares about it.

Ever since I began my first project I've been plagued with random knitting nightmares. I usually dream that an item that I'm working on some how goes awry and I'm unable to fix it, so I'm forced to frog the whole thing. In my dreams I tend to frog items that took a long time and many stitches to create.

The problem with these nightmares, is that I express myself rather loudly, and crassly. Simply put, I swear out loud- A LOT when I have knitting nightmares. Take last night for example- I somehow dreamt that the Candy Necklace Sock #2 was half complete and when I began knitting the picked up stitches, I accidently dropped 5 stitches, unravelling some cable work. Now, I should probably note that this kind of thing has happened before- I can fix a dropped stitch, but somehow, in my sub-conscious this becomes an error that I cannot, under any circumstances fix- and I have to stare helplessly as the thing unravels and unravels. And then begins the swearing. I'm not a huge swearing person, when I get really mad or really stressed out, the swearing does come out every now and again, but for the most part, I'm not a person who screams out obscenities. In my nightmares however, it is perfectly acceptable for me to use four letter words frequently. As I watched those stitches drop in my dream, I unleashed a torrent of curse words-- and tossed and turned and freaked out because the sock was completely un-fixable.

The problem is that the curse words don't just come out in my dream, they come out of my mouth, loudly... while my husband is sleeping next to me. Last night I woke us both up by shouting, very loudly, a big fat F bomb. That is in itself embarressing... especially because I woke both me and the husband up, and then when I was slightly more aware, I calmed down, realizing that I hadn't even started the second sock yet and all that stress and tension and cursing was for nothing.

What's most ridiculous about this little issue though is that my husband has gotten completely used to my knitting nightmares. Now, when I start cursing, and tossing and turning, he usually wakes up and calms me down by saying; "just put your knitting away Jen" and I usually respond to this by rolling over and stepping away from the knitting and changing my dream. The sick thing is that he keeps hoping that I have a loud knitting nightmare, including the turrets that go along with it, while I'm staying at my mother's house- because it makes him giggle to think how traumatized my mother would be to hear me say all those swears.

Even more disturbing about this, is nearly a year ago, during a knitting nightmare about a sweater that I had just finished, I got up and decided I needed to fix it... IN MY SLEEP. Thankfully the husband had not gone to bed yet and was wondering what I was doing rifling around my knitting bag. He caught me with SCISSORS in my hand, (you just gasped didn't you!) and I nearly had caused serious damage to a project. Nothing like that has happened since, but thankfully, despite his fear of a homemade gift of any kind, he's tried to prevent me from losing all sanity and destroying any more knitting.

These nightmares don't occur often, but when they do- they're so real to me. I genuinely feel like something is ruined or damaged or that I've made an error so large that I will never EVER be able to fix it. I begin panicking, wondering how long it's going to take to fix... it's awful!

Thankfully, as I mentioned, these aren't regular occurances, but they do occur enough that the husband has a patterned response to them and that I wake up remembering how awful it was. I suppose if these are the WORST of my nightmares, I really have nothing to complain about.

Here's hoping tonight's dream is an unlimited budget and a yarn store... to make up for last night!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I've never had a knitting nightmare. Do they always happen when you're stressed about a particular pattern, or does it seem completely random? Weird.

Here's to unlimited budget yarn dreams for you tonight!...