Problem dreams

Bad dream; and yet not a bad dream. My mother in her 40s with in-laws, walking somewhere. She was wearing the pretty little pumps she favours. It was a nice dream, but I woke up feeling cold to the bone.

I think it is because I started having dreams about my father in the year before his death, and my mother is old now - 80 this year - so maybe I am just afraid of the inevitable. Also, I had major muscle cramps yesterday and the day before. It's all circular. I sleep badly so my muscles seize, my muscles seize so I sleep badly and both contribute to nightmares. I used to suffer from protracted sleep paralysis, so this is probably a left-over of that old problem, especially as mum used to laugh at it. There, that's probably the connection.

https://www.google.com/culturalinstitute/beta/asset/the-nightmare/IwFwTbrht4QzgA?hl=en-GB&ms=%7B%22x%22%3A0.5%2C%22y%22%3A0.5%2C%22z%22%3A8.994495405964722%2C%22size%22%3A%7B%22width%22%3A2.0061747916624713%2C%22height%22%3A1.2375000000000005%7D%7D

Aggravation

It's been an odd couple of weeks where I've been faced with confrontations great and small; I face these with a kind of puzzlement because I am the only thing they have in common and yet can't see what I am doing that's antagonistic. There was bro, who was drunk. There were some people who want to suppress free speech for a good cause (I'm there for the cause, but not for the suppression) and now there's my neighbour. She is very nice and genial... and wants me to cut down the rowan tree in my back garden.

There are a couple of rowans or three at the front, plus the neighbour-on-the-other-side's huge old rowan that is probably grandmother to all the quickbeams around here. There's a line of rowans at the back of all our houses. She wants me to cut down mine because she says it is cutting out light from the solar panels she put in last year. I have gone out to check and don't see that at all. I hope it's not confirmation bias, but truly I don't see it.

In her text to me, she described our rowan as the self-seeded new tree against her fence. I don't know whether it is self-seeded or not, but there's nothing new about it - it was a grown tree when we moved in, and has been here longer than we have, a lot longer than her solar panels. I got some advice on the matter, and was told that I have no obligation to remove the tree; it was down to the installers she employed to look into the impact of local trees, and to check the orientation of the roof before installation. I will personally be very upset to cut down the tree, first because I love trees, and secondly because I wonder what she thought would happen with the solar panels. Did she just assume I would oblige, that my garden can be changed to suit hers? She's planted an oak in her back garden, and though oaks are slow growing, saplings give adolescence quite a dash over the first few years. It's going to do exactly what she claims my rowan is doing within three years, only more so, because it directly faces her panels.


And yet, she is a pleasant person. So how to deal with this while keeping it friendly?

I'll offer to thin it out if/when we can afford to (that's the other thing; she hasn't spoken about who should pay to remove the tree!) Beyond that, I don't know what else to suggest. I don't want tension, but seem to be unable to avoid it. It's a problem of mine because when I get upset I bottle it up badly, then smoulder, then explode. And I want things mellow but...everyone loves a walkover, except, in the end, the walkover.