Content note: Parental death, this post contains dreams from two sides of my Dad’s death- three months after and three months before.
Dreaming as microdosing death
Disorientation as a measure of distance
Disease is motor neurons dying one by one
Devotion is bites of ice cream fed to you one by one
Death is an edge between freedom and fear
11/17/23
Last night I dream that I am at my Gran’s house. She is there but her mind is distant and different from the dementia. My aunts and uncles and cousins are there too. My Dad is with us, he is dying. Weakening and disintegrating in front of our eyes. It’s happening so quickly it is hard to believe. My uncle lashes out at me in his disbelief. I yell back trying to convince him this is really happening right now. My Dad dies and becomes a huge pot of soup on the stove, me and my sister are taking turns stirring it. We keep talking to the soup as if it is my Dad.
I also dream and I am with a man, a stranger, but I know him in the dream- he is someone I ride the bus with everyday. He dies in my arms on the street. We wait for the bus like this.
5/19/23
Our in-home nurse and I just helped my Dad get out of bed. Before that, I realized the baby birds in the Begonia plant died this morning. All them crushed by the one with the big mouth that we named Big Mouth. I try to take it in stride.
While I was getting my Dad in his chair, we were asking each other how we slept. I mentioned I had a dream that me and my sister were at Niagara Falls. He follows up on this after he’s out of his room and sitting in the living room with me and my Mom. “What were y’all doing at Niagara Falls?” I tell him I don’t really know how to explain. I always have dreams about bridges and crossing treacherous bodies of water in stressful ways, like my whole life, water rising, water rushing, crossing on some rickety ass bridge. I have had so many dreams of him dying at this point, not even just recently…I remember years ago a big wave came and consumed him.
I don’t tell him this. I tell him that somehow we crossed the water. I had to follow my sister across. She was being reckless, downplaying this risk of this weird journey we were on and urging me to follow. We got up the cliff edge, downriver from the falls, but still misty and disorienting. She sets up a hammock right on the edge and is content there, no fear. I’m shocked, wet, cold, relieved I’m alive and on land. I'm not joining her there.
I look over and there is an old man sitting on some cardboard up a ways, in a beautiful sun spot. Kinda reminds me like how my dog charges up in the sun. That's where I wanna be. I make my way up to him and face the sun. I realize I might be blocking his view so I turn to him and ask if it's okay to share the spot with him. He is kind and motions me over to sit with him in the sun. We chat and I learn about how he comes there every day. I already knew it was his spot, you could just tell. The view is amazing.
My Dad after hearing this dream starts to think about his waterfall, the one he visits in his mind during his meditations. I always love to hear about his waterfall so I ask him if there is anything new there. He starts to describe how it's expanding through his senses, he can hear more animals and birds now. He says he sees a golden figure there. A gold avatar he says. I ask if he can talk to them. He pauses and says “Yes I think it's me.”
He says he’s made of golden light, he sits at the top of the waterfall. He approaches this figure from behind and comes into him. Joins him atop the waterfall.
I read this backwards (bottom to top) and it was still lucid dreamy