My dream self has it out for me.

I have a recurring dream in which my dad has died and come back to life. By the time the dream starts it’s often happened several times. My Dream Brain provides no consistent explanation for this. Sometimes his heart has stopped and restarted; sometimes it just turns out that the nurses were wrong. Sometimes no one else but me or my mom knows, and I’m scared they’re going to find out (for some reason, maybe insurance?). Sometimes I’m surprised when he comes back to life again, and I cry with relief that I get a few more days. Sometimes he’s sick and incoherent, others nothing seems wrong at all.

However, in every iteration of the dream he is still terminally ill and I know that he will inevitably die soon, just not which time it will stick. The strange stints where he comes back to life are always temporary; I never am under the impression he will get better. I wish I had dreams where he was healthy, but I think my memory of him lives on most saliently in those final days, when I watched the dad I knew slip away.

Two nights ago, my subconscious introduced a new component to this dream. I knew my dad was alive, after having fake-died several times, but he was completely unreachable—he had gone into hiding because he thought then it would be easier for me when he ultimately did die. I couldn’t get a hold of him, or get him to talk to me, no matter how I asked or how much I pleaded. I experienced a kind of pure frustration and desperation in this dream that I rarely experience in my waking life. My dreams tend to show me the full-blown versions of feelings I have more subtly while awake.

But last night as I laid awake in bed, the desperation showed its face. Suddenly, I wanted to claw open my chest, to feel the hollowness there for myself. The feeling was an echo of that from my dream; I just wanted to talk to my dad and the knowledge that that was completely impossible was unbelievable. Mostly it has felt like I eventually will be able to, and this has all been a big misunderstanding. I didn’t beg or feel anger in my dad’s final days. I mourned and took in the beauty of the love surrounding him and our family. Now, I sometimes get an itch when I think about sitting on that hospice bed. I want to shake him awake and beg him to stay just a little longer.

The permanence only becomes real with time. In my last post I talked about being afraid of his absence registering. I know this is a taste.

The way this feeling leaks into my days is in a general sense of frustration. I’m particularly angry at the unfairness of the world. Everything is washed in gray. I don’t feel the same tenderness towards strangers, the pull to engage in the divine, the knowing that things will turn out alright. It makes me sad.

I am at the Mennonite Church USA Convention this week for work, and I have inevitably been running into people from every era of my life thus far. Usually this would only feel like a series of fun coincidences, but lately nostalgia is heavy in a way it hasn’t been before. It’s strangely jarring, and I don’t like it. I want to only feel the sense of home that comes with seeing people that have been a part of my home at one time or another. Luckily, that is present too, if different.

Ultimately I know it is because everything is different. There is Before, and then there is After. I said something in one of my last posts about grief requiring you to redefine your relationship to everyone in your life, but it is much bigger than that. You must reinvent yourself in a world that doesn’t have them in it. I haven’t quite figured out who I am or how to live without my dad yet.

I’m glad that my dream self feels the feelings that are too large for the everyday. And I’m glad my recent dream showed me the origin of my unwanted disposition as of late. I’m grateful every time I learn something new about this process, even if it doesn’t make it better.

Like I have said before, this is an old song. These feelings are as old as life itself and will be here until the end of it all. Sometimes I don’t understand how everyone who has made it out the other side has done it. But they are living proof that it’s possible.