dreaming
I go back and forth between having really vivid dreams and no dreams at all. Last night, I had a really vivid dream where Belle (my crusty old granny of a dog) was in some kind of field or yard that was attached to a facility, and I was running through the facility, jumping through obstacles, to try to get to her. Someone else was there with me for part of the way, but by the time I got to my dog, I was alone. I picked her up and held her the way I always do, sort of swaddled like a baby (ever since she was a puppy, she hasn’t liked to be held facing downwards and will always twist around until she can look you in the eye).
I was holding her and watching her take her last breaths. We were in the field alone, and I knew that she was dead. I woke up from that dream with tears streaming down my temples and I was kind of shocked - I’ve had realistic feeling dreams before, but nothing to this extent. Plus, I remember dreaming about the big emotional moments in my life, but all of them were after the fact. It was after people left, arguments happened, Oreo died. I’ve never had a dream about something bad that is going to happen in the future - whether potential or actual. Perhaps shockingly to some, I haven’t even had those test day nightmares where you show up to take the SATs and you have no pants or pencils, so having this somewhat prescient dream about my childhood dog dying…was scary. I couldn’t fall asleep again that night and also couldn’t resist texting my mom the next day to make sure Belle was still alive (she was/is).
But the whole thing really got me thinking: our lives are really in our heads. In the span of probably half an hour, I felt real grief and mourning and had a fittingly dramatic physical reaction. No wonder that so many people feel like dreams must have more to them than just neurons randomly firing off, organizing the files collected during the day. And I guess I do believe that dreams mean something. I think they’re precursors, some kind of indicator of what your mind and body knows is coming. Anyways, basically I scared myself with this dream, and scared myself again when I got up and looked in the mirror, because my eyes were swollen and my pajamas were tearstained. And it reminded me that one day soon, Belle will die, and I will cry again, but hopefully I’ll keep dreaming of her after that.