I don’t remember much of my dreams the last couple of days. They haven’t been good, but good things had been part of them, going unremarked upon until they were ruined, which is a shame. Sometimes I have long, epic dreams that span years, throwing me into whole other Lives and I mourn waking from them intensely. But these last couple of days, the dreams are just the edges of my real Life but something or someone changed and it leaves me waking up feeling like the whole of my memory is the dream, marred by this new slightly different history.
It’s how I get when I can’t sleep. Dreams seem as strong as memory and it’s not till I start thinking through the narrative that I know what’s wrong.
Last night was a sad one, and walking up to the grey of a post-rain morning seems appropriate. I guess my dad’s birthday is coming up one week from today, and maybe that’s why I’m thinking about him.
Now that I look back on the dream, I think it was strangely third-person in some way. I seem to remember following the action from high above a tall suspension bridge, looking down upon my car. Some how I think I’d just dropped my parents off some place, or come from a visit. I’m not sure what the context was, the rest of the dream is fading. All that’s left is the sense that I was driving and I was talking to my mother and she was telling me that “your father and I have some difficult news, your father’s brain is dying”.
That’s the sentence that echoes. “Your father’s brain is dying”. I was trying to get her to go through the details, tell me what was happening and the symptoms and the prognosis. I don’t remember anything else from the dream and it wasn’t until moments ago, petting the cat, putting it all together in my sadness over my father’s illness that I remembered he’s been dead for 18 years.
Before that it was a house. Not the house we just bought, but the same narrative. Coming home to our half of an old duplex similar to the one I’ve been filming in down in DC. Going to unlock the door and seeing the lock had been drilled out. Pushing it open to the second inner door to see that’d been drilled too. Pushing it open, a heart-stopping moment as I see our house had been, not simply robbed, but cleaned out. Hard wood floors gleaming and cleared of carpets and belongings. Holes in the wall where not just guitars were missing, but the hangers too. Bare spots where pictures had hung. The only thing remaining was TV trays and chairs, but all dismantled and folded and stacked as sheets of wood in the centre of the room.
I started ordering people around…. Kristen go down stairs and see if Prince is anywhere, Heather go outside and call 911, I’m going to look upstairs while calling the neighbour who’s got a Ring camera… struggling to realize that everything… EVERYTHING is gone.
I wake up panicked and adrenaline-flooded, head pounding from the stress of loss.
I’m due some NICE dreams, I think.