I woke up for the second time this morning with the urge to cry like that faint tingling you get when part of your head decides it might need to sneeze but the rest of you doesn’t agree and you’re just sitting there wishing you could sneeze just to get feeling gone.
(I used to knew a terrible someone who would get violently angry if you “interrupted” their sneezing as though speaking or talking to someone who wants to sneeze is somehow a terroristic assault on their physiology.)
I’m not sad. Well, I’m not not sad. We’re in the middle of a global rise of fascism and a plague, we’ve all got lots to be sad about. But I’m not in any direct danger at the current moment. I just don’t feel as though my situation should currently requires a physical breakdown. I woke up with two sleepy cats at my feet and the sun is kind of out for once.
But just before that, I was in a dream.
Dreaming is something I desperately try to avoid to the point of purposely suppressing my REM state as much as possible. I am prone to PTSD-induced dreams and nightmares which range from the horrifying to the sad. (No one tends to have PTSD-induced happy fun fun dreams of lollypops and an end to capitalism.) They’re usually not very inventive or strange. They actually tend to be quite literal or at least keeping one foot in the obvious. One time my dream was just all the men in my life who had been awful to me all standing around in front of my family home saying mean things about/to me. I think I must waste all my creativity during the day or something.
The dream this morning wasn’t like that. This was more a general anxiety dream about feeling out of place and alone. In the dream (I’ll spare you a lengthy description of a mundane dream as much as I can) I was living with like, 4 or 5 other people. I don’t know who they were except one of them was my mom. Whatever dream stuff is happening, and it concludes with me deciding “Oh! I can just ask my mom if she wants to move out to the country with me! That would be perfect!”, imagining an ildyllic existence in the European countryside. But reality brain floods into dream brain as I’m waking and I am immediately hit in the chest with the reminder that mom is dead. Of course she’s dead. She’s been dead for more than half my life.
But she’s been, for lack of a better word, haunting my dreams. I think she might have actually haunted me just the one time. A short time after she died she showed up in my dreams acting like everything was normal and I had to explain to her that she died. That was weird. But since then it’s more that she just shows up in random roles. Sometimes the star, sometimes just a supporting or guest star. Like the Margo Martindale of dreams.
Dreaming is supposed to be you brain’s ways of processing shit and I think mine has some sort of glitch (okay, it has a lot of glitches) like one of my harddrives that has a folder stuck on it from 10 years ago that cannot be deleted without reformatting the entire drive but I’ve never owned enough hard drives to be able to back it up so it just sits there, mocking me, reminding me of the previously mentioned terrible person with the sneeze-blocking rage who used the harddrive to copy over some of their terrible music. How is my brain supposed to mull over questions like “what should I do with my life?” and “how do I avoid loneliness” by taking my dead mother into account as though she were a working piece of this puzzle?
(I can hear your shrieks of “get thee to a therapist”, and I would agree were it not for both my current financial situation and the general current situation of the entire universe.)
My mother was 4’11” (150cm) and was afraid of snakes and was a loving, silly, caring person who it would not be unpleasant to visit if she were not, you know, dead. She’s the only person who has ever truly loved me and I would like nothing more than for her memory to leave me alone. (I have a lot of memories that I would like to have leave me alone.)
I worry if I ever did dislodge her, that someone or something more terrible might take her place and cause much more of an emotional ruckus. If only I could purposely replace her appearance in my dreams with, like, a glowing ball of healing light, or a muppet, or Margo Martindale.
