Early this morning, at around 3 am, I awoke after maybe four hours of sleep. I haven’t been sleeping well. Like many of us, I have lost much in this economic mess, and I feel vulnerable and confused. I decided to take a bit of pill which allows me to wake up without much side effect (starts with L ends with A, "unest" in the middle).
I fell back to sleep rather quickly, unaware that I was about to have a vivid early morning dream, a morningmare. Because of my strange sleep level, the dream seemed real and especially disturbing. Enough to get me to exorcise it this morning though writing.
__
I often dream in color, but this one was the shade of a Saharan sandstorm. That aspect alone was scary. It begins with me working on a kind of tag sale along a busy road, with a line of tables cluttered with god-knows-what, I can’t remember. Many things. Suddenly someone says that my husband who died eight years ago had been seen nearby. First I insist no, that can’t be. But many witnesses say they talked with him and assure me he seems in fine spirits.
Joy jolts through me, and I want to believe this. The circumstances aren’t clear in the dream, but I’m told he has returned from distant parts. To see him I have to travel through a half-rural, half-city environment, and I struggle against crowds as far as the horizon; they move in a pattern like fields of golden wheat in a wind.
The people are dressed in an exaggerated way, like extras in a movie, set in some far-ago time. Goods are all around the streets. Lots and lots of stuff. In the distance I can see folks milling around a man, and from afar that the man indeed looks like the husband I had lost. I keep fighting the flow of people to get to him. The chance to hold him again is an incredible force. I fight for many minutes through the crowds.
I hear his voice before I see him. He is mesmerizing those around him, who gaze at him from every angle like you would a Michelangelo statue.
I finally get to him and he looks my way. But he is different. Younger in a way, but without expression, without his grin of recognition. His affect is without sweetness; he is a replica, without essence. I notice that his eyes are smaller, and not blue.
After acknowledging me he talks to others, as if I mean no more to him than they do. And I plead in a voice that doesn’t sound like mine, “I’m, your wife, We loved each other. Why are you turning away?” And he smiles and then goes back to the others and says he has to do some things, and disappears into the crowds.
Again I fight to find him, into the haze ahead. I come to an endless row of wooden cabins like in a prison barracks or a camp. I push open the doors and look quickly through each of them. I have no idea how long this takes in real time, but it seem forever. All the cabins look lived in, but all the people are outside.
Finally, I find my husband in a cabin. He looks at me without emotion. And I say banal things like “Why did you go? What happened? We love each other. You’re my husband. We’re together again.”
Then, “What’s wrong?”
And he says “I just had to be away,” and nothing else. And those strange eyes, almost piggish, remain glazed over.
Then he says, “A kiss will tell us if we should be together.” And I rush to kiss him, and after he is silent, so for a moment in this dream I feel another jolt of hope that we might be reunited.
But he says “I’ll be your friend,” and I feel now that he has left me because he had wanted to, and I can never be with him although he is standing there. He has chosen to come back, but not to me.
The despair makes me groan, and pulls me down. My unexpected chance to be with him again has ended. But why did he betray me? Was our whole marriage a sham?
I watch him walk back into the crowd. And I lose sight of him, but I keep searching in the gold light, asking and searching. I can’t let him go, although he doesn’t want me. Maybe I will find him. Maybe he will change his mind.
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I woke up around five am with tears in my eyes and with a headache. It took me several minutes to move and a few more to get out of bed. Slowly I shook off the images that seemed so real in that golden fog. And wrote them down.
Even now, hours later, the hurt of that taunting dream lingers. And I have to assure myself that yes, he really loved me. And I find strange, awful relief knowing that he is really gone.
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Comments
It may help to remember that all the characters in a dream are not who they appear to be, but just different aspects of the dreamers psyche. So perhaps this dream could be seen as you accepting that he had to leave, and that, sad as it may be, you can only be together now in dreams.
Your great love for each other is not in question.
Hope you are feeling better after this.
I dream in music sometimes and wake up to hum the melody into a microcassette recorder, as I know I won't remember it in the morning...
rated
At the risk of being insensitive, I will give you what my mother would say about your dream:
She would tell you he is telling you to go on living and not despair. Your anxiety about the economic etc, problems does not mean that life will end. He did not come to you to reject you, you were trying to go to him and he told you to go on. To live. She used to think the people in your dreams are telling you something, and it's not the obvious.
Wayne, yes I usually appear to accept it -- don't complain much about the loss. And after that dream I see that I need to accept it. The other feeling is the worst.
I think yes, Steve, that the sleeping pill had an effect, especially at the time I took it. I haven't been sleeping well and I hate taking drugs, but I balanced no sleep to pill, and it came out pill. I know they say that you should leave eight hours to let it take effect, and I can see why. The strong dream at that hour woke me up.
Greg, I used to remember dreams vividly. Lately I hardly remember them. I think in part you remember dreams you wake up from. Especially the ones where you wake up feeling the same emotions that you had in the dream. In this case, those feelings lasted for hours and I still remember the details.
The dreams our minds give us to help us "let go" of lost loves are just the hardest damned things, aren't they?
I'm still having them, from time to time, over two different loves--8 and 5 years later.
:-(
[hugs]
Tagudinian, what you say makes sense to me. When you hear analyses of dreams from others you can recognize what rings true.
Sorry, Verbal that you've had these type of dreams, too. The cost of love. I rarely have had them, and this one is tied in with other anxieties. Perhaps it would be worse if there really was a chance he could come back.
fireeyes, thank you for your kind comment.
Rick, you *have* comforted me by your words.
Love lost is painful enough in reality, without dreaming of it too.
Having been there in my own color-washed, haunting dreams, I can only hope you shake off the rejection and hold on to the reality.
Stellaa's wisdom from her mother makes kind and gentle sense. Another interesting view, which I'm sure you know: we are each and every person in our dreams. Perhaps you feel you rejected him when you moved on, embraced life as a solo woman. That you were punished for "selling him." And are perhaps a bissel angry with today's uncertain world and at him for not being here to help you.
Anger? Healthy, cleansing. Rejection? Piffle! Punishment? Twaddle! It seems to me he had a certain amount of time to be on this earth, and you were the gift given him in his time. You often speak of your good fortune in finding him. Try to remember how lucky he was to have you.
We are too.
"they move in a pattern like fields of golden wheat in a wind."
"The chance to hold him again is an incredible force."
Thank you for sharing, and I hope writing it down and all the supportive comments offered here helped to displace that lingering hurt.
...................................be cheerful, sir.
Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air:
And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
The cloud-capp'd towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Ye all which it inherit, shall dissolve
And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep.
Peace.
Brian, I think I will try to physically tire myself our more, something I've been neglecting. That pill is always there, but I try reading and other means before I go to it. And I try hard not to take the whole thing. Maybe that confuses things. Anyway, yes, avoid if possible.
Hawley, so far 2009 has been filled with anxiety. I eagerly await Jan 20 and hope we all feel awash in hope and well-being.
Sally, really excellent, appreciated analysis. I think you are probably right on. Some guilt in there for doing "well" and reinventing myself. I didn't think of that. I tend to move ahead and all but don't want to take away from my appreciation of what we had. Conflicted, I guess.
CCC, you are so erudite, among many other things. I thank you so much for taking the time to add that magnificent writing by the Bard. I read it several times.
He loved you very much. That much is obvious when I read your lovely posts about him. And you loved him.
Life always betrays us. Because, with it, comes death. With love comes pain. With joy comes the understanding that we can only fully experience it when we've had sorrow. Trite but true.
Maybe it was life and death coming to you, dressed in your husband's clothes. Not his own lovely soul. Of course not.
Plus, of course, after death, you have to move on with your life, and that can also feel a bit like a betrayal. For me, I try to remember that I'm not betraying those that have gone on by moving forward, because in moving forward, I am honoring my time with them. I carry the memory of that person with me. Boy, it's hard to do that. I don't always succeed.
Then again, I could be full of foolishness. Ignore me.
You are an amazing and wonderful person. You got to have a lovely person in your life with you. It isn't fair that you lost him so soon.
A very powerful post and dream. Again, thank you for sharing it.
I put in the quote from The Tempest, because depending on my mood, I find it hopeful, or pessimistic, or nihilistic, or even frightening (especially in the setting of the drama) but always beautiful. Which is what I thought of your piece as I read it through a couple of times. So there.
WOOF
CCC, erudite dog or not, WOOF. And thanks for the special compliment.
Tom, too late. I've tried that. How about Biden on a bad day. But thanks for thinking outside the box.
Rick, will look it up. I just wish I could sleep like a used to!
Of course I'm late to this, but I wanted to leave a message anyway. Hope that you are feeling stronger today. As I was reading your beautifully told dream, I was wondering about how you would have felt, facing sleep last night. Dreams can be so tough on us. That heartbreaking feeling when waking from a dream like this---once felt, always remembered.