Wednesday, November 11, 2009

In My Dreams

In the beginning of October 2008, I started keeping a dream journal, in the hopes of becoming a more lucid dreamer, and remembering more of my dreams.  But the real reason I wanted to remember my dreams better is that I don't, and haven't, dreamed much about A since he died, and I feared that perhaps I WAS dreaming about him, but forgetting those dreams.  And I hoped that if I was more aware in my dreams, perhaps I could talk to him more, instead of just fondling the frayed bits and pieces of memory of the dream the next morning.
 
I dutifully wrote down every dream I could remember, even if it was just part of it.  In over a year of recording these dreams, I have had maybe 4 dreams about A, a couple of which felt more like a visitation, and less like a dream, and a few others that had symbols connected to him, always hummingbirds.  Despite my being a diligent secretary of my dreamscape minutes, it hasn't really resulted in any increased or improved contact with my love, which was really my hope when I started the whole project.  Instead, I have pages and pages of whacked out dreams (the only kind I ever seem to have), and the feeling that he is indeed more distant from me now.  Not so far that I feel he's completely gone, but far enough that I know I'm not going to get the kind of contact I got, and needed, early on.  He has never done command performances in my dreams; I have gone to bed asking, begging, wishing, hoping for him to show up, and 999 out of a 1000 cases, he's been nowhere to be found.
 
Stubborn, he is.  I tell myself that he doesn't come because he can't for some reason.  Or because he can see that I'm strong enough to handle even the low times now on my own (regardless of how I feel about it).  Or that I'm supposed to rely on the living for my support now, and tend to those relationships more.  I tell myself a lot of things to excuse his absence.  But I suppose that I wouldn't have to do that if I accepted his real and valid excuse:  he's dead.  And whatever that means on a cosmic level, it does mean that I don't get to talk to him all the time, and I don't get any choice or appeal in the matter.  If I could just solve the "dead" part, there'd be no problem.  I guess I'm still looking for a loophole, however tiny, that would make "dead" a little less final, a little more fluid.  I want to reach through the veil to the other side and hold his hand, and I keep looking for ways to do that.  I don't really know how much of that is spiritual and how much of that is just a continuing bit of denial.  Regardless of what else it means, I know it means I miss him.  I miss him so damn much.
 
A lot of folks don't believe in any of that, that the dead can reach us here, in this world.  I wasn't sure I believed it either, and some days I still have my doubts, but I know what I've experienced.  And I know how it's changed; it is the change, the withdrawing of that, that seems the clearest proof that it ever existed at all.
 
In any case, I've been having some weird, somewhat disturbing dreams lately, and I've written a couple down.  But the most recent one, I didn't bother.  I started a dream journal with a goal in mind, and a year's worth of practice didn't lead to my achieving it, so for me, the experiment is over, and it was a failure, though I will admit to being far more aware that I'm dreaming WHILE I'm dreaming, and usually able to wake myself up if the dream goes bad.  But I don't dream of him more, and that's what I wanted.  The dreams I had were interesting, to a point, but many of them are scary, at least while I'm in the dream.  I have always, always been prone to nightmares.  I used to tell myself that my waking life was so good, I had to have all my crap in my dreams.  And then I lived a waking nightmare when A died, and I STILL didn't get more good dreams to even it out, so I had no choice but to deem myself (or at least that theory) full of shit.

I don't dream of him.  I don't have sweet dreams.  I don't even really have dreams for the future. 

Somehow, that seems wrong.
 
 
 
 

2 comments:

  1. Wrong or not, I'm in the same boat that I don't know that I have dreams for the future either. It's too hard to pinpoint or tangibly hope for anything specific, when Death handed me such a potent reminder that I can't control much in the larger scheme of things. So I seem to be left to just moving from day to day...which, yes, seems sad and wrong.

    I'm envious of the visitations. Charley never believed in an afterlife, god, nothing; he was a consummate scientist, and his lack of belief has always been my stumbling point. How could he ever be around or "visit" me in any way, if he never believed in any of it in the first place? If, at the moment of his death, he was given a choice, how could he have taken something he always assumed couldn't happen?

    Who knows. I still don't really know what I believe or hope about it. Or I know what I hope is true--I hope he is around us at times--but it [insert unknown verb here] me that I can't see or hear or know he's there, while other people claim they have. Is it a failure on my part then?

    I try to avoid that line of thinking as much as possible...but it's nice to have an understanding comrade like you with whom I can say it.

    Thanks for sharing.

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  2. I don't know why some people feel that, and why others don't, but I'm loath to ascribe it to a "failure" on anyones part. As for Charley's negation of it in life...well, I suspect we're all going to be surprised once we get there ourselves, and see what the new reality is. I doubt any of us pegged it right while living. It's probably like sex...there's what all your little friends told you when none of us knew a damn thing about it, and then, once we'd tried it ourselves, we laughed at what we thought we knew once upon a time.

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