Dreaming

For the past several nights, I've had vivid dreams of Mom and Dad... and the dreams have had their own sort of continuity. Each dream has built on the events of the night before--not in a narrative way, but in a "continuing what we were talking about" sort of way. If I wake up in the night, I find myself almost eager to drift back to sleep so that I can revisit them once again, picking up more or less where I left off.

What struck me about last night's dream was the analytical nature of it. I had noticed that, while I was seeing Mom in her late 30s (when she was still healthy, before emphysema began to impact her life), I was seeing Dad in his mid 40s (when he had overcome the disruptions in his life that his diabetes had caused, and before changes at the Rome News-Tribune left him less satisfied with his job). I asked why, since Mom and Dad were only a year apart. "You see us when you think we were happiest," Mom explained. "That's the way it works. People see the ones they loved at their happiest. It may even change from time to time, as people remember other happy times. But we can see all the different times, all the different appearances, at one time. We see you as a child, as an adult--we see every day at the same time."

It was a wonderful dream moment--vivid, and one of those little narratives that will stay with me for a long, long time.