Visitations

The week after my mom died, I dreamed about her every night. Except, it wasn’t exactly her that came to me. It was her corpse. I won’t describe these dreams here, because I don’t want to shock you or be emotionally manipulative. You would probably find them disturbing and macabre. I know I definitely would if I came across them from some other writer. But believe me when I say that, though the circumstances of each of these dreams is objectively strange and terrifying, they brought me a real sense of calm, even comfort, both at the time I had them and whenever I think about them now.

I’ve always had vivid dreams, pretty much on a nightly basis. I’m grateful to have them; even more grateful that I remember them pretty clearly when I wake up. I’ve read that dreams are an important biological feature — not just a cool side effect of our sleep cycles, but a way for our brains to process and store information. It’s healthy to sleep and dream, in that dreaming serves a real purpose in the way we fundamentally function.*

That’s not to say that if you don’t dream often, or don’t remember your dreams, that there’s something wrong. Merely that your brain may rely on other fundamental functions to do the same things that dreams can accomplish. Here I should mention that 1). I’m not a sleep expert, and 2). the science of dreaming is ever evolving. But, regardless of the studies or research, I love that I dream and feel as though dreaming helps me, both on a mental and emotional level.**

And regardless of my personal opinions on the matter, there is one thing that most of us can agree on when it comes to dreams: listening to other people describe their dreams is (most of the time) insufferably boring. I mean, dreams are surreal and insular and run on their own kind of logic specific to the person that’s, well, dreaming them. I don’t think we yet have the language to communicate our dreams to each other in a way that captures their essence, and I don’t necessarily think that that is a bad thing. My own rule of thumb, when describing my dreams, is to sum them up in two sentences or less.*** For instance: I dreamed that I was in my hometown, but it wasn’t my hometown. There was a train track loop around the whole valley and I rode a train on it to my house, but it wasn’t my house. Often in my dreams, I recognize a familiar place or person by a feeling rather than by physical similarities to its real-life equivalent. Often, the dream versions of places or people look nothing like their real-life versions. So if I dream of my hometown, it’s almost as if I’m experiencing a whole new town, one that I know on a deep, almost molecular, level and recognize as mine, but which looks and operates completely differently in my dream life than it does in my waking one.

This is also what happens when I dream of my mother.**** After that first week of corpse dreams, I never had another one. The dreams that featured my mother from then on, featured her alive. I can count these dreams on one hand in the almost five years since she has been dead. I savor these dreams, and am fiercely protective of them. I won’t describe them here. But I will say that in each of these dreams, it feels like I’m getting the chance to see my mother again, or a version of her that I didn’t know in life. She is my mother, but she isn’t my mother.

I told this to my therapist in Oregon, in the first year following her death. I said that sometimes I dreamed about my mother, and that I woke up from these dreams feeling a lonely kind of longing; a longing that was tinged with a dissonant note of happiness, even relief. It was a confusing mixture of emotions. The dreams made me miss my mother anew, with the same intensity I experienced the night she died. They also made me hungry for more. I wanted to dream about her every night.

My therapist was a thoughtful and caring woman. She nodded as I talked. Then she said something to me that clicked: “Of course you want to dream of her every night. Dreams are different from memories, which are finite and immutable. In dreams, your mother can come to you in a way that you can’t remember from a memory. Your dreams present your mother as an amalgamation of your memories of her, which means she can come to you as a new experience, or encounter, one you never had in real life. It’s like a visitation in that way.”*****

Yes, I remember saying, feeling as though she had cracked open and solved a puzzle I’d been worrying at my whole life. It does feel like a visitation when she comes to me in a dream, because it feels new; it becomes a new memory of her I can cache in my mind, a fresher one that won’t distort with age, for a while at least, like all the others. I get to see her again, and for a few moments after waking, remember what it means to have a mother in the waking world. I can’t bring the visitation of her with me when I wake up, but I do bring the emotions these visitations elicit. For the rest of the day following such a dream, I feel fragile and vulnerable and close to the surface of things. It is a weird, but not unpleasant experience. Even when these dreams could be considered scary or bad, I look forward to them more than any others. You see: she is my mother, but she isn’t my mother. She isn’t, but she is.

“Oh,” I thought upon waking this morning, feeling open and exposed, both content and ill at ease somehow at the same time. “She was there. She was there.”

In two sentences or less, what did you dream about last night?

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

Notes:

Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams by Matthew Walker, PhD, is an excellent read about the importance of sleep and dreams on our health and well-being. Unlike me, Dr. Walker is a sleep expert and his insights are fascinating. This book will, at the very least, make you think about prioritizing good sleeping habits.

**When it comes to the brain, these two are one and the same, no?

***So naturally, I’m writing a many-paragraphed blog about dreams.

****Or, as it happens, her corpse.

*****I’m paraphrasing because memory is maybe not as immutable as we would like, but this is the essence of what she said to me that day.