Once more, with feeling

The dictionary describes a recurring dream as "typical dream themes that occur over and over and are believed to reveal the presence of stressors in an individual's life."

No shit. 

I have a near nightly dream. Or...I should say early daylight dream. I believe that when I fall asleep each night, I leave my body and go somewhere else for a bit. Kind of like leaving one's dress at a drycleaners. I think I just get off that pain train for a while. T tells me that when we go to bed, I am often deeply asleep within one minute. 

"It's a goodnight kiss and you are out of here," she says. She says that I barely move and am completely silent. That she often lays her hand on my chest to assure herself that I am still breathing. 

I think that I return in the early hours of the morning. 

And then....the dreams start. They are almost always the same, with slight changes. I am with S, C, or L. Sometimes all three of them. Sometimes, a niece or nephew. Children I don't recognize. But, they are always children. Always under the age of 12. 

The theme will sometimes change at that juncture. We will be baking a cake and I will be so tired that I worry that I won't be able to complete it. Or, I will have a stack of gifts that need wrapping and I just know that my hands won't work. There is always a mess somewhere that I am responsible for cleaning up and I don't feel up to the task. My feelings are always the same in each dream. I feel totally overwhelmed and extremely embarrassed, worried that "someone" (?) will find out. So, I pretend to laugh along, when inside I am so terrified, sick and tired that I can barely function. 

This morning, I dreamed that I was with S, C, and L. S and L had made a picnic breakfast and were eating it under the dining room table. This has actually happened in my real life more than once and I believe that I even participated in it. But.....over a decade ago. The kitchen was a mess. C was making some sort of papier-mâché airplane on the kitchen table. I felt like weeping. How was I going to get this mess cleared up? It was too much. I was too weak. I was sure that I couldn't fake my way out of this. Yet, I was promising to make bacon for S and L and looking in the fridge for it. 

I woke up in tears, aching all over. Hardly a nightmare. Right? In fact, in my old life, this would have been a pleasant memory dream. In my now life, it was a nightmare. 

And I have it over and over and over again. There are tasks to be done and I am not up to accomplishing them. I sometimes dream this dream (or a facsimile of it) every single early morning. Right before I wake up. And then, I wake up in tears, defeated before my day even begins. 

I try giving myself pep talks at night before I get in bed. Tell myself that I am perfectly fine as is. That those who love me, love me. I have nothing to prove. And I will myself to ask for help in those dreams or just admit that I cannot make that bacon. Cannot crawl under a dining room to clean up a breakfast picnic. It hasn't worked so far. So, the dreams keep haunting me. 

Since being on chemo, my dreams are frequent....bright colored, sometimes nearly psychedelic, and I wake up with vivid recall. Another recurring dream I have (but not nearly so often....maybe once every couple of months) is of a man in a brown hat and raincoat. His face is nondescript. But, his sneer and his voice are memorable. He often finds me in a crowd, sometimes I even see him coming and try to dodge him, but am always unsuccessful. He mocks me, tells me that I am useless, that my own mother didn't even love me. That I will not be mourned when I am gone. That I am a twit, an idiot. Sometimes, in these dreams, I fight back. I tell him to shut his hole. I throw things at him. He laughs. I wake up more than often, not sad but mad as hell. 

Still other dreams are good. I wish that these were the ones that I had every night, but they are fleeting. Now that I am more in pain, I will dream of those who have passed. My Dad. My Mother. My Uncle Jim. Once, an old high school classmate. These dreams are lovely, peaceful, filled with light and love. My Dad holds me and I smell his pipe tobacco. My Mother and I are walking along a dirt road and she stops to pick rhubarb. We talk. It is cheerful talk, mostly about how proud they are of me. My Mother once said in a dream that she thought we were too much alike. 

"We both were so much smarter than those around us and it made us disagreeable sometimes."

My Uncle Jim will be in a bar and he hands me a shot of Tullamore Dew and tells me to drink up, not to be a sissy. Once he told me that he is paying for his human bigotry and he was glad that I would be spared that. Not fires of hell, he said....but the realization that I hurt my world. I harbored hurtful thoughts against others. That is a terrible burden to bear." 

My old classmate reminded me that we had both liked the movie Dog Day Afternoon. He told me that the dead still miss the living, that he had missed his mother every day of his passing and that reuniting with her gave him great peace. It did feel odd, though. In my dream, I was the age I am now and he, a high school student. I was old enough to be his grandmother, yet he held all the knowledge.

It has made me believe in an afterlife. I am not a religious person, but I do believe that life does not end with death now. We just....sort of relocate. One time, I asked my father in law in a dream what heaven was like and he laughed. 

"There is no heaven like I believed. It is like....a layer cake. But, you see so much more in this layer. And it is true. You only get to bring love. And all that matters is love. The rest falls gently away."

I often tell myself to ask the hard questions when I dream of the dead. 

Is there a hell?
Can you answer prayers?
Do you hear our cries?

But, I always forget or there is never the time or the inclination. In the last dream I had of my Mother, we talked about recipes for rhubarb. 

I don't even like rhubarb. 

All I can say is that dreams invade so much of my sleep time. I wish that the good ones were the recurring ones and the bad ones the fleeting ones, but I don't get to choose. 

Instead, I sigh and stretch out my legs, swing them over the side of the bed and wearily prepare for the day.