Dreaming About Dead Parents

Growth, loneliness, wonder, and seeing the unseen.

HI

Two nights ago, I dreamed about my (dead) mother (alive in dreamland). She and my (very alive) father were helping me pack up an apartment where I was living, and where it seemed they might also reside. Had I been living in an apartment with my parents? Where were we? How old was I? How old were they? In dreamland, I didn’t seem much older than I was when she died (24), which makes sense—some part of my psyche only recreating her, and me in the same space with her, at that point in time.

We weren’t packing fast enough in dreamland, and kept discovering new cupboards filled with kitchen goods, copper pots, clothing, and bathroom accoutrements. I was very calm. My parents were not. They did not want to miss the flight we were booked on the next day, and as it became increasingly clear we wouldn’t make it, my father got on the phone with the airline to change our tickets. Infuriated with the corporate airline bureaucracy, he told me and my mother we were now rerouted through…Rwanda. Oh my god, my mother exclaimed, making it clear that Rwanda was very far from our intended destination.

Don’t worry! I calmed her. There are some incredible hotels in Rwanda! (Ostensibly I was not referring to the 2004 film Hotel Rwanda, or maybe my dream self was just having a little fun.) I didn’t seem to mind being routed to Rwanda along the way to wherever I was moving. Maybe that’s because I had absolutely no idea where we were going. Or maybe it’s because I was just happy to be moving out of this space I’d been living in (seemingly for too long, possibly with my parents?).

And then there’s the fact that I’m almost always glad to be in dreamland with my mother, a liminal space where she is still real, where we can coexist, get on each other’s nerves, pack boxes, argue about hotels in Rwanda.

I woke up feeling refreshed, relieved, aware of some subconscious shift in my psyche—I had packed up and moved out of the space I’d been occupying with my parents, dead and alive. Heck yeah, I thought. Internal high five! (You don’t give yourself inner high fives?)

I considered the relational roles between me and my parents in this dream compared to a dream I had two years after my mother died, in which I was having sex with some version of her that bore an impressive phallus. Fourteen years later, I’m assuaging her concerns about international travel and moving out of an apartment where we’d been living together. Progress! Individuation!

Waking up with this somewhat hollow feeling of accomplishment (am I, in fact, writing about the dream in order to make it more real?), I began considering how much change happens below the surface. The cadence of my days for the past two weeks has been punctuated by tending to seedlings that spent their first week plumping up under the soil. It was an exciting guessing game (don’t question my thrills): when would their little green sprouts would pop out of the soil and stretch to the sun? So much of their transformation happens underground, long before it’s visible.

But I’m not here to deliver some trite metaphor about the inner work you’re doing being just as, if not more, powerful than what the outside world can see. I am here to get very curious about everything that I can’t see in others, myself, the wild, the universe.

For example: We’re about to be gifted with the appearance of a second “mini-moon” in November, just one of many mysterious planetary happenings orbiting outside our daily purview. It’s not really a moon at all, it’s an asteroid. (A small one, don’t worry.)

And an entire mile down in the depths of the ocean where creatures generate their own light to survive, an octomom once brooded over and defended her eggs for four years without taking in one iota of nutrition.

And right now, as you read this, you are having some extraordinary mix of thoughts and emotions that nobody could ever name from looking at you on the outside. (You look amazing today, btw.)

Can we ever really know each other, or understand the way someone else sees the world, sees us? Are we meant to? Striving to understand, to be compassionate, empathetic, generous with our worldview—all of this seems like the right thing to do, the way to build a bridge from the places in us that feel small, trapped, stuck living in an apartment with our parents with no way out except to fly through Rwanda.

Or perhaps we long to understand what’s below the surface in ourselves, and in others, because otherwise life would be a bore. If everything is known, transparent, flattened, we lose the novelty effect, the rush of dopamine that comes from having a new experience. Perhaps the polarity of living with what we can see and accepting the wonderment of what we don’t know is the good stuff, the juice of life.

After I last wrote to you about women, sex, and reality tv in America, I read a post from Elise Loehnen that shed light on an “epidemic of male loneliness”. I was quickly moved by psychotherapist James Hollis’ insights about what lay below the bravado-filled waters of heteropatriarchy. Loehnen details a “crisis” demanding our attention.

What would happen, I wondered, if I reached out to the men in my life to ask them about their loneliness, to dredge up the unseen? It’s said, after all, that the antidote to loneliness is not merely company but being truly seen by another. Would there be some meeting of truth, some connection, some mutual seeing?

What might happen if I, quite simply, cultivated a willingness, an openness, to see the unseen?

Perhaps this is why I always want to share my dreams. I want to hold the glimmering, quivering fish I brought up from the deep and show it to you, I want you to know that there is more to me than what you can see, I want you to understand me in a language without words.

Look at the way the sunlight shimmers on these fish scales. Look who I am beneath the surface. Look at this part of me before I toss it back to the depths.

Consider this an official invitation to share (part or all of, use your discretion) a dream you had recently—just click the button below. Are we building a collective dream journal? Not no.

SOME HOT LINKS

To read.

After discovering B.A. Van Sise’s extraordinary portrait of poet Jane Hirshfield (with falcon), I had a chance to preview his book On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues, which pubs today. The book profiles 80 language revitalizers from around the country, interwoven with essays by collaborator artists, writers, and poets. As America stands on yet another sociopolitical precipice, reckoning with the ways its past and present have silenced indigenous cultures, On the National Language charts a map to locate, name, and uplift the country’s often unheard tongues.

To listen.

Octomom (via RadioLab)!

Lifestyle evangelism via the lens of trad wife culture (via

Anne Helen Petersen

).

Esther Perel and Miranda July on understanding and experiencing the erotic.

To watch.

A new series from the Duplass brothers that looks exciting: Penelope.

Will & Harper—just watch the trailer.

STAY SANE

I look forward to hearing about a dream or two, from you.

xo,

Lily