Retro-Blog: 2014.01.03 (Originally posted elsewhere online.) My Father The Zombie

So I just woke from a strange dream.  

In it, my Father resides in a small house not too far away which I do not recognize from my waking life.  Both of my Sisters and my Mother were visiting him on the occasion of him being "awake".  In both my waking life and this dream, my father died in 2010, but in this dream he is somehow preserved, not buried, but just lying in bed in this simple little house.  

He becomes "awake" and interactive at unpredictable times, but always during daylight, and I had the sense that one of us is always there just in case, and to inform the others.  He doesn't eat or drink or go to the bathroom like a living person, but he carries on unfocused conversations and slowly putters about his little house, very much like he did in his final years when he was having one of those days when he wasn't entirely sure who was named what. 

The strangest thing about this dream is my Sisters and my Mother and I (Me?) being all in the same place at the same time with no tension or big drama going on.  The only drama was an in-dream memory of arguments with my Son who is convinced we are making this whole thing up and are all insane.  

This is just one of many dreams I have had when I have awoken with a strong sense that I had just returned from an actual place which I can only visit when I am asleep, and to which I have been going infrequently for years.  A place not part of the reality in which I am awake now, but a different reality which is simultaneously familiar and impossibly different from this one.  At this point, I've only had about two hours of sleep, so I'm going to go back to bed soon.

 

[2022 Self-Editor's Notes: Much context from my personal history would illuminate just how much stranger this dream was for me than may be otherwise evident.  However, much of that history is visited in various chambers of this labyrinthine, yet somehow monotonous blog, so I won't go into much depth here.  

I don't know of any time when being in the same room with my Mother and Sisters, particularly my older Sister, did not result in varying magnitudes of drama, but it all came to a hideous crescendo during the time leading up to and shortly after the death of my Father.  To be incisively fair, my Mother was not actually present for any of that, as she had him locked in a box of hate ever since their separation and divorce decades earlier.  

During the declining time of my Father's life, through multiple hospitalizations and incarcerations in hellish "care" facilities, I endeavored to be by his side and advocating for the quality of his care as much as possible, and my Son was there with me for most of it, helping me endure it all.

There, that's more context than content, as it is so often with me.}