Bad Dreams

Lately I've started having dreams about Mom dying. Mostly minor ones, and I guess it was just a matter of time before my subconscious finally decided to give the situation a full treatment. I've been having a few ever since I got back from Nebraska, but as my grief gets more intense, so do the dreams.

I've always had scary-realistic dreams and my brain delights in walking me through the most awful stuff with unlikely but vivid details.

The usual setup for the latest crop is usually plain nonfiction--she's dead and I see her ghost in various settings, very generic. Nothing like what I know my head's capable of. Nothing worth recounting except that the other night I actually woke up with my hand over my face trying to feel whether I was making the same grotesque D: expression as in my dream.

I think tonight was the fourth night in a row. This time, though, it was a nightmare. Mom died, then my brother came home alone from the hospital and shot himself on her bed. I guess his girlfriend wasn't in this dream because no one found the body for a long time. The stink was terrible and the body so decayed they had to drain parts of it off the bed into buckets.

I didn't want to go into the house because I was sure it would reek of death, but my sister had cleaned it up and we were going to have a funeral there whether I liked it or not. She let me in and was like "Look, the bed's still good." She wanted me to sleep in it when I stayed the night. I refused to go near it and she got angry at me. I started smelling putrid flesh. It was gag-inducing but she didn't smell it at all.

Next thing I knew the body started reappearing on the bed as it was when they found it. Just for a moment. Then my brother's ghost started bothering me. I found a letter he wrote about how much he always loved and admired me and how it wasn't my fault, he just couldn't stand Mom being gone and he hoped it wouldn't cause too much trouble.

Then my sister turned on the TV. It was showing my brother's autopsy. He didn't have a face anymore but I knew it was him the way you do in dreams. I ran over to the window so I wouldn't see anymore. Then we had a funeral and the real grief I was feeling for mom got the volume turned up to nearly unbearable levels. I remember thinking "God, this isn't the way I normally feel. This is more like those dreams I used to have about people dying." The dream got really boring from that point on. Rather than spend five more minutes describing the minutae of grief I'll just skip to the part where I wake up with every nerve on my body shuddering in sick horror.

I went back to sleep, hoping the next dream would be better. It wasn't.

In this one, I was outside getting a banana from a vendor and they started shouting about a big storm and possible tornado on the way. There were black clouds in the sky. Everyone went to the park to sit under the big trees and wouldn't listen to me when I said they weren't safe. I ran down an alley knocking on doors, but no one would let me take shelter. I ended up hiding under a tiny awning with two kids while huge white bolts of lightning hammered down all around.

The dream changed again and I was in a morgue watching some crazy asshole make out with the corpse of his girlfriend, who had been split right down the middle by a chainsaw. She was lying in her left side, truncated side up. From under the table it looked like he was just kissing a sleeping woman, but then I stood up and could see her tongue and head move around in her skull.

The sound of the birds outside my window woke me up. I was glad. I typed this up so I wouldn't have to go back to sleep with all of that in my head.