dream theater

[fox]

Background 1. Yesterday some emails went back and forth planning my brother's next approximately-quarterly visit to stay at my house and/but hang with my mom.

Background 2. A colleague (who is at least 20 years older than I am) lost his mother last week, less than a year after his father died. He's handling it quite well in the circumstances—in both cases they were old and ill and now they are no longer suffering.

But/so that's probably why last night I had a terrible dream, the kind where at first someone I knew in college was telling me looking after my mother had consumed much too much of my time and attention in the previous year (in the dream, my junior year, although the person I was talking to was in real life a year behind me) and I'd need to step up and be a lot more present in my upcoming senior year, which I understood to mean basically "Look, is she going to die or isn't she?"

(And somehow following that extremely unpleasant conversation, my actual best friends from college and several to many other people I know now had all retreated to the attic in my parents' house and were smoking weed up there. In real life I cannot bear the smell of marijuana smoke, but in the dream I was happy to hang out with them even though I didn't have any myself.)

And at the end of the dream, my father was back somehow, but only for a short time, and then he kind of deanimated and returned to the grave while I screamed and begged him not to; and then my mother started musing that she had better go soon, and I sobbed and said no, not yet, at least wait until $Brother is here; and I called my brother and told him to get down here as soon and as fast as he could.

And then I woke up with my heart pounding.

I've got to find some kind of therapist or support group for anticipatory grief. I can't live like this for an undefined amount of time.