Nothing says “personal growth” like throwing a man out of a van and sprouting abdominal tentacles in your childhood bathroom.

The dream opens like the climax of an action flick: I’m in the back of a speeding work van, packed with important-looking equipment. I strap a man into a harness and ask, in a voice void of life, if he’s sure about being launched from a moving vehicle. I list the mayhem this will likely bring to his body—every risk recited like a script I’ve long since memorized. My job is to make sure this man has all of his safety equipment on properly… then launch him out the back of the van into traffic and collect the data. Suddenly I realize why I feel like I’m in an action film. This is a scene straight out of the movie Twister, with a morbid little twist. Instead of throwing robots out the back of a van into tornados, we are launching a middle-age man. With no tornados in sight, Sky Daddy (aka God/Lord) only knows what purpose there was to throwing this man out of a van in order to collect mysterious “data”. 

I do not like this particular role I have been cast in. It feels wrong. I don’t mind checking his gear—logistics I can handle—but the moment he nods, I realize his consent isn’t enthusiasm; it’s exhaustion dressed up as agreement. Like he doesn’t feel like he has a choice. I certainly have no enthusiasm for throwing others to the wolves, or in this case, speeding vehicles, but here I am doing it. I know that flavor of resignation. I’m tasting it now. The quiet script that says, this is my job, this is my role, so I do it.

I do my job. I thoroughly check the safety equipment, and dutifully recite my consent gaining script. Then I throw that poor schmuck out the back of the van, and collect the data. All in a day’s work. 

Next, I find myself in the bathroom of my childhood home, because naturally the solution to an existential crisis is a good hand washing. As I wash, I note a cramped sort of feeling under my shirt around my abdomen. In the mirror I can see something bulging from under my shirt. I feel like I know what it is before I even lift my shirt. I carefully pull up my t-shirt to reveal…drum roll please…blue violet tentacles sprouting out of me in all directions. I sigh deeply. I have the same feeling I had throwing the man out of the back of the van- I’m disappointed and resigned. It’s not what I want, but it is what it is. I yank my shirt back down, feel that cramped feeling once more, and I get on with my day. 

I head to my bedroom to change and find the man I threw out of the van waiting there. It seems he might be my boyfriend. He is trying to engage with me in a sexually playful mood, and I promptly rain on his parade. I tell him he won’t have shenanigans in mind once he sees what I am packing. I lift my shirt. His jaw drops. He doesn’t look disgusted, just absolutely shocked. I can tell he is not processing any of it. The tentacles are out, the shock has landed, and I turn away- like I haven’t just dropped a bomb- to aimlessly tidy my awkwardly silent bedroom.

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Dissecting Tentacles & Traffic Tosses

Dreams, much like toddlers and politicians, rarely make sense at face value. But if you sit with them long enough, they start whispering secrets in strange symbols and familiar feelings. So let’s rewind the reel and squint at what this cinematic chaos might actually be trying to tell me.

Let’s start with the van. A work van barreling down the highway, doors flung open, and me—dutiful as ever—strapping a man into safety gear so I can fling him into danger and “collect the data.” Honestly, it feels like a metaphor for every role I’ve ever had that involved emotional labor. Caretaker. Teacher. Partner. Parent. The one who preps everyone else for survival while secretly wondering if this is just how it’s supposed to go.

The man doesn’t resist. He consents—but not in the “hell yeah!” kind of way. It’s more of a sigh-and-suit-up energy. I know that energy well. It’s the slow erosion of will that comes from being good at something you never really wanted to be good at in the first place. Self-sacrifice dressed as competence. I recognize it because I’ve been both the flinger and the flung.

And then—smash cut to my childhood bathroom. The site of so many awkward transformations and hidden feelings. I lift my shirt and there they are: violet-blue tentacles sprouting from my abdomen like inconvenient truths. Not threatening. Not violent. Just… there. And I don’t scream or panic. I sigh. That same heavy sigh of resignation.

This isn’t a monster movie. It’s not horror. It’s biology. Something has grown in me, through me, maybe despite me. Something beautiful and strange, and wholly mine. But I don’t celebrate it. I shove it under a shirt and keep going.

Then there’s the bedroom scene—a strange reunion with the man I tossed. Maybe now a lover. He wants play. I want space. He hasn’t seen what I’ve been hiding, and when I show him, he can’t even process it. He doesn’t run. He just… short-circuits. Meanwhile, I return to picking things up. Back to autopilot. Back to managing.

This feels like the heart of it: the moment where vulnerability meets misrecognition. I showed someone my weird, wild, sprouting truth—and they couldn’t meet it. Not with judgment, but with silence. Shock. Maybe the silence of someone who never knew what you were carrying. Maybe the silence of someone who sees you, finally, and doesn’t know what to do with it.

So what is this dream trying to say?

That I’m tired of performing calm while everything inside me is sprouting alien limbs. That I’ve grown things—truths, gifts, aches, art—that no one prepped me to carry, and I’ve gotten used to hiding them in plain sight. That I’ve thrown parts of myself into traffic to “gather the data” for others while forgetting to ask: Who’s strapping me in? Who’s making sure I’m safe?

And maybe—just maybe—it’s time to stop shoving the tentacles back under my shirt. To let them stretch out into the room. To say: this is me—strange, soft, and sacred.

And if someone can’t handle the view?

Well. They can buckle up, or get yeeted out the back of the van.