The Dream

THE DREAM

~

I dreamt of you last night

…comforting me

…listening to me

…paying attention to me.

Caring about what I had to say.

Offering me words of kindness and wisdom.

I dreamt of you being all I needed you to be

…when you were alive.

~

 My Father passed away September 25, 2010...

I had a strange dream last night.  It was a sort of role reversal between my mom and my dad.  Instead of my dad dying, it was my mom.  And instead of my mom giving me advice and words of comfort, it was my dad.  Maybe it was because at the end of our phone call last night, my mom hung-up on me. 

I am half-way wondering if my dead father visited me in my dream last night.  By all of my standards, this could be totally viable.  I awoke, by the dog, at the end of the dream at 3:18am.  3 am, I have always heard, is the peak hour for spirit activity… and apparently for dogs to go pee.  3 is the prime number for me and my dad.  If I could only use one word to sum up the relationship between my father and I, I would use the word – three.  It is a very personal and symbolic word for me.  He left our family, his three young children, when I was only three years old.  And so, the fact that I dreamt of him being alive, pleasantly talking to me, comforting me about my mother’s rotting corpse lying within a coffin inside my garage, and that this all occurred at 3 AM  in the morning makes perfect sense that his spirit in fact was visiting me last night.  Otherwise, if not a spirit bringing this twisted scene, then what or whom else would I have to blame for this unwanted powerful vision?  Surely not myself…

It was the first dream I have had about my dad since he died.  I knew one would come, eventually.  But I was honestly surprised by the switch-up in roles between him and my mom. 

He was sitting in his hospital bed, the one that he lived in for almost four weeks during his time in hospice care in his home.  The same bed I watched him struggle against death in.  And the same bed that death overtook him in.  What was different though was the way he looked.  He looked like my dad in this dream.  Not the shell of person he had become.  He looked like the picture they used for his obituary.  It had been a long time since he looked that healthy.  I find it odd how our minds, at times, will cling to life, to what is good, what is right, even if that was only but a small slice of reality from a brief season of his life.  We somehow take that small glimpse and turn it into what we know… what we remember.  And we feel somewhat better. 

The problem with that, is that this distorted memory of reality, messes with you.  You can look at the obituary and think… it was not his time.  Look at him, he looks so vibrant.  So alive. 

He was anything but.

He was so grossly overcome with death just before his last breaths that it seems it was too much for even my subconscious to deal with, even during a dream.  I had to turn him back…into his obituary picture.  I had to turn him into a dad that was actually there for me.  I had to make him into a dream to be what I needed.  What he could not be when he was alive.

... More to come! Excerpts taken from book I am writing:

After You Leave, Who Will Love Me?

A Memoir of struggle to find love after adoption, divorce and death