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.