Haunted by dreams
I just woke up from this very... intensely un-intense dream that was so.. personal?
For some reason I found myself walking or driving down our road and I realized that it was much later than the last time I'd been home. There were just some signs that things were different... no cars in the driveway, but the light outside had been changed to something more... “modern”, the satellite dish had been moved and looked different too. I somehow knew it was some 50 years or more in the future. However, I was still in my 20's or 30's and curious, I walked to the door through the darkened garage and opened the door inside. I heard a voice that called out “Hello?” and I walked inside, not really answering. There was someone in the kitchen, and as I looked around, almost everything was the same, except for things one would normally have to replace over the years. “Hello?” I finally replied back and I saw a woman who I didn't recognize. I was hoping to see my mom there... but I knew right away that it was far too long since the time I was there for her to still be here. “Who's there?” the woman asked again and I walked in farther. “Is my mother here?” I asked with some lost hope and she just shook her head as if she felt sympathy for me. “Oh..” I said, walking around the upstairs a bit. “Um.. Can you tell me where I've been?” The lady shook her head. “No, not really.” For me, it had seemed that I had no memory of anything that had happened... had I died, but come back? Had I been taken away and returned years later? The bedrooms seemed almost the same, furniture in the same place and items like cabinets with plates and picture frames still hung of us. “Can you tell me what happened to her?” Again, the woman wouldn't say. I went downstairs, just wandering the house. First I saw the main part of the basement... things had been stacked up and covered with blue sheets and neatly packed away. I found parts of my mom's life after I'd left... a child's easel with signs of paint laid with more items pushed into corners. The furnace room was full of saved items. For some reason, this person who lived in this house had kept everything she could. I wandered to my room and saw it very similarly was in about the same, though some things were also boxed and covered. I got to thinking to myself “Who is this person? Is it just some stranger? A relative?...” I went back to her again and asked “Where did I go... why am I here now?” and again this woman, maybe in her 40's or so and a bit nondescript didn't have much to tell me. “Who are you?” was my final question before I found myself waking up... at the same moment with this concept of lifting the cloths off of things in the basement and the home's computerized identification system suddenly recognizing the individual items that had laid under the cloths for so long that it perceived the bundles as single un-identified objects.
This wasn't a nightmare for me, but one of these strange “gets into the eerie parts of your soul” dreams that I find myself occasionally having. I think this dream really gets to the mortality and shortness of life that I think about a lot. Life is so finite and outliving your parent (especially when you're single) is an extremely lonely concept that you know you're doomed to experience. My mortality and that of my aging mother (who, yes, I do still live with at the moment) is something constantly on my mind. When she leaves, what will I do? I know that loss of a parent has existed since the very beginning, so I've no doubt it'll happen and chances are that no matter how I think I can't cope, I'll find some way to just like I did when I watched my father wither and die from cancer in our living room when I was 15. And of my own life... anything could take me away from this mortal existence. What is “nothing”? What is it to just fade and not exist the next moment. The concept is one that haunts me very often-no afterlife, no next life, no sentience. Just the pure and simple loss of energy and spark within me that made me think and perceive that I was “me”. That which was my body will exist, but the singular perception of “me” would not like those moments when you find yourself daydreaming and you realize you've lost 10 minutes... you don't remember them... for those 10 minutes that which made you perceive yourself did not exist?... like a dreamless coma... the end of everything.
When I look back at this dream, part of me initially thinks “Why was I dead, or who took me and brought me back after so long?” But after reflection, it seems much more like a haunting... a soul in a state of loss and wonder, unable to fully grasp that they're dead, but sensing the loss and bewilderment as things have changed. But that this person perhaps felt for the tragedy of this soul unable to break the bonds of this location and has somehow felt the compassion to keep it as it was to give a lost soul a place to live. Maybe this haunting happens often for her, or just occasionally. Her demeanor certainly seemed to suggest that she wasn't scared, nor extremely forthright, but perhaps she honestly didn't know who the soul was who visited her, and I had no idea I'd ever done this before.
Anyways, I felt I needed to express this dream in some way.
Not all of my dreams are this way. Earlier ones in the night included me running down a forested sand dune hill and hiding under logs from a giant alien/dinosaur-like monster in full-color (lots of greens and browns) (I never actually saw it and not much else to said plot... in fact, it sort of rolled into the "haunting" dream) and a strange dream where I laid-out designs quickly and hap-hazardly as if via a heads-up-display and later on going back through the files that had sort of degraded in substance and re-working from compressed thumbnails to make them ready for print again... as if the memory of the original files had to be drug back up again and enhanced to re-create the files and manipulate them to be good again (I remember this one being black/white/red in particular)