In Dreams
dreaming of flying and flailing
I’ve been dreaming about flying. They’re not good dreams; I’m not soaring freely above trees, exhilarated, like I used to dream when I was a child. Instead I’m flying too low to the ground and I’m floundering, bouncing up and down in the air, worried I’ll meet concrete at any moment. I feel as if I’ve been pushed out of a plane without a parachute and all I can do is flail my arms at the last minute to avoid dying.
I’ve also been dreaming about being abandoned. At amusement parks, at parties, at the grocery store. In each dream I’m left alone at a moment when I’m desperately in need of someone else. I walk around looking for the person who abandoned me, I get lost in aisles, lost among scary looking roller coasters, I make my way through crowds of people who all act like I’m not even there. I am a specter, a thin wisp of humanity, and I feel a deep anger at those who abandoned me and left me to fend for myself.
When I was little, my aunt had a book called The Dream Dictionary. We used to rifle through the pages, rattling off the things we dreamed about most: school, money, teeth, death. There was no dream that mean nothing, they all had meaning, they all pulled from our daily lives and we would be enthralled at the things the book told us, how it delved into our psyche to reveal what our dreams foretold.
As I got older I started to trust myself more to interpret my own dreams. The book was more like telling fortunes and my dreams were not like that at all, they weren’t there to predict, they were there to tell me what was already happening. There were definitely times when my dreams were a mashup of what I’d watched earlier and what I was thinking as I fell asleep. Not every dream is a product of your life. But the ones that are, well they are pretty telling.
In this one I’m at a hotel and I’m supposed to be there with Todd but he’s nowhere to be found. His suitcase is in the room, unopened, his side of the bed untouched. I get into the bed and toss and turn and wait for him to come back but he never does, and I ask the hotel desk clerk to send the suitcase to him. I don’t know how I’m going to pay for the room or get back home and I feel a great sense of loss and grief.
This dream repeats itself with different scenarios each night and I’m self aware enough to realize what’s going on. I have to reconcile my dream life with my waking life and say the words to myself: I feel abandoned. There it is, the thought that I’d been pushing off since January 30th. The word I didn’t want to use because it’s so harsh. The word that would open the door to resentment.
I spoke those words out loud first to my therapist, so I could be in a safe space when I finally admitted to myself what I’ve been feeling all along. I’m so hesitant to say or think anything that could paint him in a bad light because I have a need to keep him as a good guy. Turning him into a bad guy means turning my entire fourteen year relationship on its head. I’m not ready to reckon with that yet. But my dreams are. My dreams push me to acknowledge the basic facts. My dreams are unrelenting in their desire to show me how I’m really feeling, to make recognizable what I am always trying to hide. It’s easy when I’m awake to push all of that aside but every night as I lay my head on my pillow I think, here we go again.
In this dream I’m in the air, arms outstretched, trying to maintain height. I’m flying above my house and I look for his car but it’s not there. I remember he’s gone and my arms suddenly go weak and I wobble in the air precariously, nearly skimming the roof with my body. I know what waits for me below - an empty house. I feel a rush of sadness, which weighs me down and I sink the ground, tumble onto the lawn, roll down the sloped glass toward the sidewalk and then the street.
I don’t need a dream dictionary to decipher this. I know exactly what it means, I know the burden it bears. I wake up upset and I understand I have to acknowledge my deepest feelings, have to speak them out loud and reckon with them or I’ll just keep dreaming like this.
The night after I talk to my therapist I dream that I’m planting a garden. I’m frustrated at first, because I keep watering the plants and they don’t seem to be soaking up the water. I wait. I talk to the plants. They retain the water and begin to bloom and I feel happy in a dream for the first time in ages. When I wake up, I feel rested.
I know I have work to do. I know acknowledging my pain and my sense of abandonment is just the first step on a long road to feeling whole again. My goal is to fly high enough to be above things; both in my dreams and in life.