30 September 2012

Dreams, Death and the Waking World


since her death I've often dreamt about Mum - being somewhere with Mum & Becca, usually a dream-representation of a place we lived in or visited years ago. sometimes she's young (i.e. about the age I am now), sometimes in her mid-70s, and frail as she was for several years before she died.




I often know that I'm dreaming (always have, as far back as I can remember) but that doesn't make the dreams any less real, or any easier to control.
and I know that there's the reality in dream-life and the reality in waking life, and they're different. sometimes I know in the back of my sleeping mind that Mum is dead in the waking world, but that doesn't affect her existence in the dream.

today was the first time that I consciously (unconsciously, I spose, given I was asleep) thought "I'd better hug Mum now in this dream, because, although she's alive in the waking world too, some day she won't be, so I'd better make the most of hugging her in this dream now".

Mum was looking much like she did a couple of years before her death, grey hair and shawl wrapped round her shoulders, talking to one of the cats (Tigger, who died in the mid 1980s) as she went to the kitchen to get herself a cup of tea. I was a bit worried that the milk was past its use-by date.


Tigger

2 comments:

John said...

I, often, dream of my grandfather, who I was closer to than my own father.

And while I don't always know I'm dreaming, I seem to always know I'm dreaming when I dream of him - which means I wake thinking about what we did in the dream and start drawing the parallels to what we did in real life, which means I wake thinking of very fond memories.

greenspace said...

how lovely to have such fond memories of your grandfather, John, and to be able to revisit them in your dreams