I had a dream that I ate a sandwich with my barre socks. Like, the black, sticky socks you have to wear during class so you don’t slip and and fall when you’re trying to hold a plank for a thousand seconds. I literally placed a pair of socks between two pieces of bread and ate it.
I thought it was gross, of course, but other than feeling like I was going to throw up, I didn’t seem to find anything wrong with it.
That’s the thing with dreams — because this was obviously a dream (you didn’t really think it was physically possible to bite into socks, right?). Things might seem weird, but they also feel so right. Not that eating socks felt like a normal thing to do, but it seemed real.
I woke up after the dream horrified. Part of me wondered if I had actually eaten my barre socks in real life. I vividly remembered sitting on my bed, alone while biting into the sandwich and chewing the socks like they were slices of cheese. I remembered being grossed out because the socks were dirty. They had collected dust from walking around my apartment and although I knew this and could see the remnants, I continued eating the sandwich anyway.
With tears of disgust running down my face, I was able to easily bite and chew the socks, and because of these unrealistic happenings, my awake self knew the dream was a dream, but why? Why was I having this dream?
For the next couple of days, I couldn’t stop thinking about this dream. I wondered what it meant. Then, it hit me.
Nine weeks before I had the dream, I started Weight Watchers. For weeks, I obsessively tracked every little thing I ate and tried to be as active as possible to speed up the weight loss process. This journey led to a whole lot of two of the things involved in my weird dream: barre and sandwiches.
Being allergic to gluten, I refrained from eating sandwiches prior to joining Weight Watchers. But since starting the diet, I began eating more food than ever before — and that included eating bread (gluten-free bread of course). I realized that eating more ‘good-for-you’ foods helped me to get full faster and eat less ‘bad-for-you’ foods when hunger kicked in. I started putting peanut butter and bananas on toast. I started making tuna sandwiches for lunch. And finally, I began losing weight.
As a Pure Barre devotee, I made sure to go as much as possible to surpass my weekly goal of points I received for exercise. I found myself in yoga pants and barre socks more than anything else. I would do barre moves everywhere I went — like when waiting for dinner to finish cooking in the kitchen and when hiking.
But after week 7, my motivation to stick to Weight Watchers started to fade. I could make excuses about the weather, but sticking to the plan was hard whether it was nice out or gross out. Rain made me want to sit on the couch all day instead of going to barre, and sunshine made me want to get drinks with friends and eat out at restaurants.
As unhealthy habits kicked in, so did unhealthy thoughts. I was not only losing motivation to diet and exercise, I was losing motivation to do anything – whether that be to write, to clean, or to hang out with friends. My discouragement in my diet led me to be discouraged in other areas of my life, and although I knew this, I couldn’t shake the disappointment — until I had this dream.
Unable to get the image of myself eating a dirty (but gluten-free!) ‘barre sock sandwich’ out of my head, I vowed to never let my barre socks get dirty again, so I cleaned. I mopped the floors, vacuumed the couch, and disinfected the bathroom. And after that, I hopped right back on my diet. I made myself a tuna sandwich and pushed myself to go back to my barre studio (wearing clean socks of course).
Although I cannot stop picturing myself eating my barre socks and wanting to vomit because of it, I am happy I had the dream. Instead of punishing myself for losing motivation in real life, I managed to punish myself in my dreams — and that was honestly enough of a wake up call for me. And I mean that quite literally. I woke up immediately in a pile of sweat after eating my dirty barre socks and because of that, I will now only eat healthy sandwiches, attend barre class on a regular basis, and clean my apartment regularly so my socks don’t get too dirty in case I do ever decide to eat them.
Just kidding. Gross.
