Thanks, anonymous yoga teacher. I've used that technique in the past and it has helped, I just kind of forget about it. I've slept well and free of bad dreams for eight months or so, so I forgot all of the old strategies I used.

I will say, I think I WILL sleep better tonight - receiving an unexpected "hey, just wanted to say hi" phone call that verified for me that not only was the loved one I had the nightmare about alive, but also very very well, so that's one concern off my mind.

(I probably should have just wimped out and called them myself on the pretext of "*I* just wanted to say hi" earlier in the day, but I try to keep myself from doing that. One time when I had a bad dream about my dad dying, I wound up sitting up by the phone for the rest of the night just waiting for it to be an acceptable hour to call him and verify that my bad dream was really just a dream. I think I made it until 7:30 am, but as that was back when he was still teaching, he was already up and had eaten breakfast and was ready to go to work...)

I'm kind of irked that the minor anxiety issues are coming back; I thought I had banished them. I tell myself that the anxiety is nothing "real," that it is something that is just a stupid biochemical legacy - like our cravings for sugar and fat are the ghost of optimal foraging past - because when Og the nervous caveman was scanning the horizon all the time for predators, he didn't get eaten, while maybe the more mellow cavemen didn't see the predator coming...so Og lived and (apparently) overcame his anxiety long enough to reproduce with some cavewoman, and passed his anxious genes on down to the next generation, and so it goes...being hypervigilant is a good thing when you're a hunter-gatherer, not so much in modern day North America where food comes from the grocery store and the most likely "predator" is that SUV being driven by someone who is distracted by their cell-phone call.

I TELL myself it's nothing "real," but I can't quite bring myself to believe it.

(And it's not caffeine consumption - I haven't even drunk tea in the past three weeks. Nor is it excessive sugar; I'm actually eating less sugar than I often do. So I can't peg it on anything biochemical that I can easily alter by altering my diet. I'm guessing it's the heat and humidity; they affect my asthma and make my chest feel tight, and I think the rest of my body interprets that as anxiety and makes the appropriate (inappropriate?) neurotransmitters.)