They are not happy dreams.
I was in charge of watching over Dad’s casket for the night following his death. His funeral would be in the morning. But the casket wasn't like other caskets, because he was (or was to be?) cremated. Instead of what you’d normally expect, it was like a shitty electric guitar case, though larger: rectangular, with a textured hard plastic body that was painted a faded light green. It was roughly the proper length, roughly six-and-a-half feet long, and close to the proper width, maybe 30 inches across, but it was only a few inches thick. The case was on a bed, on the left side (if you were lying in the bed). The bed and the room are unfamiliar to me. I was standing next to the bed on that same side, and pacing down its length.
When I got to the end to turn around, the case was gone, and Dad was there in his hospital gown, though not weak and thin like he was at the end. He was pale, though not deathly so. He was annoyed at one of the IV tubes, and was reaching around over the top of the bed, which was now tilted up at the head like a hospital bed. I became upset, because I knew I had to tell him that it didn’t matter: he was already dead. I moved to help him untangle the tubes and that’s when the dream ended.
The next dream took place a little while after his death – maybe present day. I was in the driveway of an unfamiliar house, and I was leaving. I was sad, though not about leaving. I get the impression I had been visiting its residents for the first time after Dad died, not unlike the recent trip down South that Liesel and I took to see Tante Emmy and Oma.
So I was getting ready to leave the house in an unfamiliar car, when for some reason I became aware (perhaps I just skipped the expository part of the dream; perhaps I just can’t remember) that I could instead take a very fancy black sports car instead. I decided to do so, and started to take my stuff – an overnight bag – out of the unfamiliar car.
When I got to the sports car, I noticed that the very large spoiler on the back was in fact two separate ones, and now red. It was more like a wing than a spoiler – raised up rather than flush to the trunk lid – but there was no center. It wasn’t missing, but intentional. Then I noticed that each piece was broken in the same way. The material was like a thick, very hard foam-core that had cracks in several places going front-to-back, getting progressively worse as they went toward the center of the car. The spoiler(s) would clearly fly off if I tried to drive it. I had the thought that I was lucky that it hadn't flown off on the drive here, and I didn’t notice that I had already identified the other car as mine.
The sports car was parked next to yet another car, which I knew belonged to a man that either lived or was just staying at this house. He was also an electrician, or I think just a hobbyist, and I went inside the garage to ask him if he could help clean some of Dad’s electrical stuff out of the house.
Here’s where the dream became strange, and really sad, though briefly nice.
Once I went into the garage to find the guy, the garage became more like the kitchen I have now, and the man was suddenly Dad. I immediately started crying and we started hugging. We were holding each other super tight and I had my hands on both his shoulder blades, which I could feel distinctly, as I could when he seriously began losing weight – like around Christmas 2010. I’m not sure if I could feel him losing more weight as I held him, but I know that I was aware of his thinness, relative to how he was in his prime. Still crying, I said, “I miss you so much, Dad.” To which he replied, “I know you do. It’s okay.”
That’s when I woke up, still crying. About an hour later, I called my therapist to make the first appointment of the new round of sessions.
