Recently, I’ve been having dreams about people I haven’t seen or spoken to in a very long time. I wake up feeling disoriented, wondering why they appeared again. I try to conceptualize the meaning, but also tell myself it’s only my brain misfiring, tying together memories and sensations in the haze of sleep.
Usually I forget the dreams soon after I get out of bed and start my day, but they often return to me late in afternoon or even in the evening, when everything is quiet again. I take in a quick breath when I remember who was walking through my dreams last night. Sometimes I feel guilty, like ever remembering these people somehow discounts who I have today. Other times I start thinking of them in depth and have them on my mind for days. Many times I’m baffled, but it doesn’t bother me.
Tonight, I feel contemplative about it. I wrote a letter to the person I dreamed about earlier this morning, when it was still dark but my husband had gone to work already. I rehashed old memories, viewed them in light of today, after four and a half years of distance. In the end, I told them that I used to think they were the cause of my suffering, but now I know I was the cause of my suffering. I told them I don’t blame them for anything. If anything, they freed me.
The letter joined a folder on my computer called “letters from someone.” Letters that are written but will never be sent. In one of them, I mention a dream I had about five years ago now. It was about someone I was only friends with at the time:
In my dream, when we pulled away, you asked if it was okay. I didn’t have an answer, I didn’t know. I just said, “I’m so in love with you.”
You said, “I’m in love with you, too.”
That person is here now, and we tell each other we love each other all the time. Five years ago, I dreamt about someone that was going to be in my future. Now I dream about someone I cared for five years ago.
It makes me think of the adage, “No one ever truly leaves you.” These people are folded into my consciousness, and even if I don’t think of them in my waking hours, they are there all the same. They may influence me in benign ways, like showing up in my dreams. Or their actions from long ago may factor into my reactions and feelings now. The feelings I judge as negative are just as present as the ones I typically call positive. I hold onto resentment, bitterness, regret, shame, and I also experience gratitude, joy, fondness, peace.
Just because those people are no longer sharing physical space, they are with me, and I am with them, even if it’s just echoes and shadows.
My task is accepting that and honoring it while staying present. I think of how much I’ve changed in five years, and I wonder at the change I won’t see in others, but has still happened, without me. I can cling to an old version of someone, but it wouldn’t be honest because that’s not who they are anymore. If I see through the ego, past what we did to each other in our suffering, I can see the essence of that person.
Maybe that’s who appears in my dreams, in that hazy subconscious state when my body is resting. Maybe my soul knows I brushed against another soul, even for a short period of time, and it remembers the imprint, the essence, and simply can’t let it go. My mind may let them go, my life situation may move on without them, and my body may never touch theirs again. But the soul knows. The soul knows.