Dreams and Idealisms

I guess it was last week when I had the first dream. The day after Thanksgiving, or maybe the day after that, I dreamed about my grandmother.  In this dream, she was alive, healthy, and very happy.  Her hair was still dyed black and she was living in a very nice house.  She smiled at me and hugged me.

I was taken to a bedroom, one that I knew somehow was mine, and allowed to rest.  The bed was high off the ground and very comfortable. It's odd to sleep in a dream, but I did.  It was wonderful sleep and I felt safe and very secure in my new bedroom. When I woke in this place, my grandmother was sitting on the side of the bed. She told me she was overjoyed that I was spending Thanksgiving with her.

Last night I had the second dream. In this dream, my mother was alive again.  She was living in her second house (insurance bought this house after her first house burned. This one burned too. My mom's houses always burned down), but not as it was.  Instead of the chaotic mess of neglect and poverty that house always seemed to have, it was clean and well furnished.  It was like the house as Mom would have wished it to be.

It was also full of Christmas decor.  There was a large living tree with silver tinsel and decorations on the walls.  The house was warm and my mom's smile was warm as she told me she was so excited to have me and my brother and his family with her for Christmas.

In both cases, I woke up from these dreams in a kind of wistful hurt.   None of it was real. None of it could be real because my mother and grandmother are both dead.  They're gone from me and there will never again be a holiday with them.

Maybe the hardest part is that even when they were alive, the holidays still never would have been like that. They both hated holidays.  They went through the motions of them in a kind of resigned annoyance and made their displeasure known to anyone who asked . . . and pretty much anyone who didn't ask as well.

But maybe . . .

Maybe when you die, there is this kind of time of reflection, when you look at your life and all the bullshit and realize there were moments when you could have had joy but just didn't allow yourself.  Maybe Mom and Grandma are showing me how they wish things could be, how things might have been if  . . . if . . .

Or maybe it's just my brain trying to console me, trying to nurture me in some way. I've been sick and it's almost my birthday.  Birthdays aren't easy. It's not so much that I care that I'm getting older, just that I'm kind of overwhelmed my the years, by how much things have changed and in all the ways they haven't.

It could just be that I'm reading too much into all of this.  The best course of action might be to stop analyzing why I had the dreams and just focus on what the dreams gave to me.

Getting to see my grandmother smile at me when I woke up . . .
Watching Christmas lights reflect off of my mother's skin . . .