Standing in the meadow

So, I had a weird-ass dream last night. I’ll preface this by saying I woke up around 3:00AM, and didn’t get back to sleep until 5:30 or so. My sleep patterns have been whacked for a couple of weeks now. It was after I fell back asleep that I had the dream.

In the dream, I was a firefighter, something I did for a year when I was 18. My unit had been called for mutual aid to a neighboring department, which was a squad we didn’t know. When we got there, there were also three or four other departments engaged. I don’t remember the details of the incident, but one of guys from the home department was badly hurt, and several of us started to take him to the hospital.

This is the part where logic stepped out of the dream, because we carried the guy on a stretcher for 30 or 40 miles, over dirt country roads, along the shoulders of lonely state highways, and overgrown trails in the woods. We took turns carrying him, rushing ahead to clear a path, and desperately trying to get an ambulance. We never could find one, and as we progressed, I noticed that my comrades were disappearing one by one. They weren’t vanishing into thin air, but just I’d realize after a while that another person had wandered away from the group at some point. Finally, within a few miles of the hospital, there was no one left but me, and I had to discard the stretcher and carry the injured man for the last part. The entire ordeal took hours, and somewhere along the way, I realized he had died, but I carried him anyway. I finally made it to the ER. I was alone, carrying a dead body, both of us ragged in sooty turnouts. I didn’t know his name or the names of anyone in his department. I couldn’t answer any questions, and I was exhausted. I collapsed in a chair and fell asleep, which is when I woke up.

The absurdity of the situation almost makes it laughable, but it was disturbing nonetheless. It’s been awhile since I’ve had any sort of dream that I recall, but this was definitely a new twist on the recurring dream of the never-ending walk to nowhere.

Someone asked me recently if I dream a lot. I’m sure I do, but the macabre ones are the only ones I ever remember in the morning. There’s obviously a lot of dark things under the surface of my mind, and I often regret that they don’t break the water during my waking hours. It might be easier for me to understand and deal with them that way, but in my dreams, I feel defenseless. The “normal” part of me gets swept away in a riptide of darkness, and I awaken on a foreign shore, disoriented and wondering what the fuck (if anything) is wrong with me.

I didn't sleep well last night. I went bed with a rough cough and it took me a while to get settled in. After a few hours, though, I woke up at 2 AM with an anxiety pit in my gut and I never really got back to sleep.

Around 3 AM, I got up and went to the restroom, and took my phone with me. I was hoping that if I could throw up, it would alleviate my nerves, but no such luck. I scrolled through my phone and I realized i had received a message shortly after I had gone to bed. My uncle (my dad's BIL) passed away on Wednesday evening. He had been in hospice, so there wasn't a shock, but there it was.

My aunt passed away two years ago. She was the self-appointed matriarch of my dad's family and adored by everyone, especially the nieces and nephews. I went home for her memorial service and took my daughter with me (she was 12 at the time). It was a bittersweet trip, but I was able to reconnect with my cousins and also was able to share some of my heritage with my daughter.

After the memorial service, the family ended up at my aunt and uncle's house. All of the cousins sat in the living room and chatted while our kids raised hell in the basement. It was so striking, because we all realized that not long ago, it had been our parents in the living room and us in the basement. It was also obvious how many of our parents were gone. It seemed surreal.

This afternoon, that house is empty, and those experiences now exist only in the memories of my cousins and myself. For a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon two years ago, we all shared a room and caught a shadow of those of those memories as it wafted past us, then we went back to our lives and homes. I suppose we might have suspected that we'd never do that exactly again, but today, we all know for sure.