Dreaming last night that this has all been a cruel joke

[JHCP]

So last night I dreamt that my beloved Jack was still alive. He passed in March of 2015 so rationally I should have known it was t real. He held me as I wept and told him everything I went through. He told me he was in a coma. When he woke he wasn't able to find me, but that he was here now and everything was going to go back to normal. It felt so amazing to be back in his arms. Safe, as he always made me feel. Everything felt like it was going to be okay again until I remembered having his ashes. He said his kids used them to trick me so I would leave him. The ashes were fake. The. As I am telling him how horrible everything I went through was I remembered viewing his body. I remembered being in the hospital. It was obvious I was imagining things at this point but my god was it so amazing to have him hold me again! Woke with a deep sadness this morning!

I miss you nugget! 

[KATPILOT]

There is a whole lot to read about dreams such as yours.  Dreams like that are too real not to have been influenced by more than just your subconscious.

[MartyT]

Lots of information about grief dreams contained in this article: Nightmares and Bad Dreams in Grief

[scba]

I do understand you. I'M in the second year and I still have dreams of my boyfriend that wakes up from coma, or when I say "I knew you survived" and I am holding him and it feels so real. A friend of mine who lost his father 8 years ago keeps having dreams with his dad showing up saying "this is a joke, I'm back to you". 

[kayc]

I think that's what we all want...

[JHCP]

It was so bitter sweet! Thank you for the site to look up MartyT! All day I have been in a funk! I just want to be back where I was with my love. Safely tucked in his arms. I miss that so much! He was so tall and strong I miss feeling that safe. The dream was so vivid it has brought back a lot of feelings. ? I am so glad I got to feel it again though! 

[kayc]

I miss that too.  I haven't had that feeling since he died...

[JHCP]

Kayc I hope and pray that you get to dream of that! It sucks waking up from it though!

[Patty65]

I want to write this, so I will, and hope it is ok, it is something that is based on much less a significant event. 

One time, my daughter with her Montessori School, took a four-day trip to this very special, an unihabited Hawaiian Island called Ko'ohalawe.  It is a sacred Hawaiian Island that was used for bombing practice by the US Military in WWII.  There, she, along with small groups of students from other schools from around Hawaii, spend those days planting native Hawaiian plants, bonding in dorm rooms that had mice running around, and singing and playing the ukulele around camp fires.  She was maybe 13.  They even had to get dropped off IN the water from a boat and swim to shore because no boats were allowed to dock at the island.  The beaches were pristine and they were the only ones there with brilliant skies and close bonding with others their age.

When I went to pick her up and she got in the car, she was SOBBING and SOBBING hysterically.  She NEVER EVER wanted those days to end because they were PERFECT.  She was in grief in her young mind over having something so perfect taken away, and having to get back to life.  I was shocked at her strong emotions.  And I thought of that when I read your post.  So I'm writing it, because I see the analogy.

Your dream sounds precious, and heartbreaking that it was not true - at least true in how we understand it.  Maybe it was more than a dream, maybe he was connecting with you, maybe, maybe.  If I saw Ron in a dream like you did, I too would be so heartbroken all over again like the first days, to wake up and realize it was a dream. And I would CLUTCH the fresh vision of my eyes upon his face.  I'm so sorry for the pain of the wake up.  I hope the comfort and joy from the dream though will give you strength to get through the rekindled grief.

Patty

[JHCP]

Patty65 thank you for your words here. It was so amazing and so heart breaking. To get to feel his love and his arms around me again...I am truly blessed! ??

[kayc]

It's kind of like that now though, with us paying the price for having loved them so deeply, yet I would never have done anything different in order to avoid the pain, for me it was worth it.

[JHCP]

Kayc, it is SO worth it. He was always sick. It was a choice...or more realistically it wasn't a choice at all. It happened just as it was supposed to. I wouldn't do anything to change the time we spent together! He was my best friend and everything. It was so worth all this pain! I will love him forever!

[rdownes]

That must have felt amazing to feel being back in his arms again, it is so hard for me to even remember, I haven't dreamed of Kevin since he passed I wish I would though. I agree I would not change being with Kevin to avoid this pain, we were all truly lucky and blessed to have felt such love some people never find it I feel for you though about how you felt once you woke up  it is like reliving losing him again, this pain is so hard.

[Clematis]

That sounds like a wonderful dream, and made more special by its intensity. I had a very vivid dream a few weeks ago that my father suddenly walked in his front door and wondered why I was living there full time and had gotten rid of his clothes and rearranged things. I told him that I thought he was dead- that the people at the hospital had told me he was dead and I had a death certificate and all that stuff. He told me that he was obviously alive and why was I acting like he was dead. It was unnerving. I was relieved to see that he was alive, but rather disturbed... How could I think he was dead for several months when that was not true?

[KarenK]

Laura,

For several years after my father died, I would dream that he had come back, if only for a visit. We never discussed the fact that he was dead. After a while, he would merely say "You know I can't stay" and he would leave. The dreams were comforting in a way. My dreams of Ron are stressful, but then my marriage was stressful at times. My dreams of my mother are filled with guilt as I couldn't make it to the care home before she died. She was gone 10 minutes after I was called. My dreams of my daughter are foggy, but with her faith, she surely is in a safe place.

[Clematis]

Karen, I had a visit in a dream once from a woman I really didn't know very well. I had a horribly stressful job running a symphony box office that got busier and busier as they worked on ticket sales. Eventually I couldn't keep up, made errors, they fired me, and replaced me with two full-time and a half-time person. But as things were getting busier, Cynthia was a devoted volunteer and she helped me-saved my life really. She was in town helping her son, and was having some weird health problems after a visit to the dentist. She went to see he husband and her own doctor in California. Some weeks later, I had a dream that she came into the symphony office. I jumped up to hug her, but she stepped back, held out her hand, and told me that I shouldn't be so happy, because things hadn't gone as well as she'd hoped. I figured out how to call he husband in CA the next morning and he told me that she had found she had leukemia and she died the day before.

I think Cynthia wanted me to know what had happened to her. I think she really cared about me. Had she not come and told me, I would have never known! And she wanted me to know...

[Clematis]

On July 1, 2016 at 11:39 AM, MartyT said:

Lots of information about grief dreams contained in this article: Nightmares and Bad Dreams in Grief

Six months, huh? That's interesting...I am at 5-1/2 months and had this dream that really really upset me. I had a visceral response to this dream and it continued over two days. I am usually pretty good at figuring out my own dreams. I have also worked with a lot of clients with their dreams. I don't tell them what it's about-I coax them into figuring out what it means to them, because it's their dream, and somewhere underneath they know. They just don't know they know. I don't know what it means-it's not my dream. I just know how to nudge them in the right direction.

So I had this dream in which for some reason I cut off the very edge of my cat Lena's ear with a pair of sharp scissors, and also injured some part of one of her front paws, but this part is less clear. I was horrified in the dream-that I had done this heinous thing to my beloved cat that I love more than anything.

It was reminiscent of an actual thing that actually happened to Lena - I shut her tail in the car door. We had both gotten out and were sitting on the ground next to the car and I opened the car door to get something I forgot, and I nudged the door closed. But as I closed the door, she whipped her tail up and it got caught in the door. She screamed, I opened the door, grabbed her up in my arms and sat on the ground next to the car, hugging her and sobbing because I was so horrified I had done this. We were outside the independent living place where she works as a therapy cat, and after a few minutes I took her inside and she visited with her friends. She seemed totally normal, but I was totally numb from panic.

As soon as we left, I called a friend who had to retire early as a vet and told her all this. She was very calm and asked me questions. No there wasn't a lump, While she was getting tired of me messing with her tail, that spot didn't seem any more sensitive than the rest. Good-that meant that there were probably no fractures. Then she told me to carefully feel the temperature of her tail from the base to the tip. If it seemed warm and then felt cooler at some point, that meant there was likely to be circulatory damage and Lena would probably have to go to the pet E.R. and have about half of her tail amputated. The temperature seemed totally the same and she was absolutely fine, but it scared me to the depths - the idea of having Lena's tail amputated because of something I had done - how horrific!. So anyway that part was real but it turned out ok, as scary as it was.

Lena is a therapy cat, and although she has a safer life than a cat who goes freely outdoors, she faces certain risks because she travels about in a car. I am vigilant about her safely and watch everything that goes on with her, but still there are risks, no matter how careful I am...

Back to the dream. Dreams have many layers, and given what I just wrote about the experience with her tail it makes sense that the most superficial layer would actually be about Lena and that she would suffer some permanent harm that I had caused and everyone could see for the rest of her life. Another layer would be that I have lost my father, and we were a family of three. Losing Lena or some significant part of her, like her graceful beauty, would be a brutal blow. But this dream was deeper and I knew there was some part of this nut that I was not cracking.

When I was just as upset about the dream today as yesterday, I called a close friend who is a psychiatrist and also a trained psychoanalyst. She is amazing, but has really serious health problems and so does her partner. I really try to not bug her, but I finally called her and told her the story. She first pointed out that if I was that unnerved, there was something very real about it. Yeah! She then pointed out that the injured part of the cat was her head and specifically her ear. Well, I have just had a car accident and then was hit in the head in Hawaii, and am anxious about my ability to continue making a living where I listen to people for a living and really have to use my head. My O.T. did an evaluation that scored me at or below the first percentile in activities where I do sequencing that involves timing. Distraction is having a big impact on my speech. I am worried, and my safety net (my dad) is gone. No one else will take care of me if I cannot support myself.

She suggested that I probably had some concern about hitting my head again. I said, oh yeah, right- I hit my head about six times the day before on my canoe in my garage. But not very hard. It hangs from the ceiling and isn't quite high enough, but I think it is because I have been walking under it for 11 years.  I keep thinking I can walk under it and most of it is ok, but Greg re-hung it and the very end is now just a little too low. I need to get Greg to help me pull it up about an inch higher so I won't hit my head on it. She then told me that when you have had a head injury, even very small hits on the head can be very detrimental. Oops! And the part of the dream about Lena's paw...well I do have a hand and elbow injury on my left arm (paw) and not following the OT's directions very well as to homework.

So, anyway, dreams are where you process things that you are avoiding during your waking hours. They are a creative effort by one part of your brain to put on a little play to get some other part of your brain to pay attention or see something that you don't want to look at or are afraid to know. When you are awake, you can avoid thinking about this and that, but when you go to sleep, look out! All the locks on the closets and hidden trunks of your unconscious come undone and there it is-whatever you don't want to see. So, I had this little family of three-me, my dad, and Lena. My dad is gone, I am very concerned about Lena in my waking life, but the other family member-myself-does anyone here think I am showing a lot of concern about taking care of my self, not causing undue stress, not further injuring myself, etc? In my waking hours? Uh, probably not...

[kayc]

Laura,

If you can't get your canoe moved up, try putting something around the bottom of it to cushion it so if you run into it you won't hurt yourself.  Foam padding comes to mind and would be easy to make a sleeve for the bottom of it with packaging tape holding it together.

[Widowedbysuicide]

The only dream I have had with Gord in it was just recently.  In the dream I viewed my husband's naked body in the morgue.  It didn't frighten me or make me behave/feel bad, it just seemed to be what was meant to happen.

In other dreams, I have known he was dead and gone but never saw him.  Those dreams feel the same.  

Maybe I'm not ready to dream a good dream...

[Clematis]

4 hours ago, kayc said:

Laura,

If you can't get your canoe moved up, try putting something around the bottom of it to cushion it so if you run into it you won't hurt yourself.  Foam padding comes to mind and would be easy to make a sleeve for the bottom of it with packaging tape holding it together.

Thanks, Kay! Greg is coming to help me tomorrow, and I'm sure we can get it at the right height. He rearranged the way the ropes went around the pulleys-the way I set it up 11 years ago worked but was a little awkward and constricted the movement of the garage door. You could only get the garage door all the way up if the canoe was out of the garage. He rearranged it while I was in Hawaii so that the door works properly with or without the canoe, which is good. Unfortunately, it takes two people to secure the canoe high enough-one to hold the canoe up high and the other to tie off the canoe to the cleat with a cleat hitch. Ultimately, it would be good to redo it with two more pulleys so that I could do it alone, but that will have to wait. I'm not doing much canoeing these days...the canoe has just been a convenient place to store bubble wrap for the move...

[Clematis]

1 hour ago, Widowedbysuicide said:

In other dreams, I have known he was dead and gone but never saw him.  Those dreams feel the same.  

Maybe I'm not ready to dream a good dream...

I think most dreams are to help you work out what you can't quite figure out or deal with during your waking hours. I always figure that if I have a dream about something really mundane-say, washing the dishes, things are going pretty well in my life. I had a dream wherein my dad walked in and demanded why I was rearranging his house as if he were dead, when he was not. I think that one was to get me to look at the denial I still had/have about his death.

I had a dream a couple of nights ago where all kinds of people were in and out of my house without my permission-one of them was a kid I work with-and my friend ran up to me with a purple towel and said, "Here's your skirt" to point out to me that I was wearing a T-shirt and underwear in front of all those people, including a kid that I work with. Dreams about being in your underwear or naked in public are classic symbols of being "found out" as inadequate. I do feel like that I am inadequate to my current tasks and that it is obvious to everyone that I'm not functioning very well, and very soon I will back to work (working with kids) and they may see that as well. The dream points all of that, as well as that that I am way more anxious and worried than I am aware of in my waking life. I think dreams generally comes down to what you are avoiding looking at..

[Clematis]

When my dad first died, I had several weeks of dreaming all night and every night in a frenzy of things to do to help him, to save his life-only to wake up in a panic of sweat, realizing that he was already dead. One night it it stopped; I had turned a corner. That was a rather transparent dream...I was stuck in his ending and was having trouble moving past it.

[kayc]

I don't remember dreaming for a long time, I must sleep hard most of the time.

[Clematis]

I am back to having trouble sleeping; I have trouble getting to sleep, staying asleep, and waking up too early. And I am a person who slept through a category 3 hurricane, gunfights, police raids, musicians jamming all night, sandstorms (while I was sleeping in only a folded sheet on the beach on a river trip), and so on. I am too filled with panic and deadline anxiety to sleep. All the things that usually work if I have a little problem are not working...Dang!

[KATPILOT]

It's rough when that happens Laura. I go through that every month or two but for me it passes on it's own. I hope that happens for you soon.  Sounds like there was a time when you were dead to the world to sleep through that stuff!