Joanne: Dreams (Part 4 of 7)

I would have dreams about Gary after he died.

Gary Joanne BW.jpg

One of first ones dreams I really remember, he was sick but had gone golfing to a golf outing.  He actually came into the bedroom and I said, “How’d it go?  I had a really good day.  Where’s the other guys?”  Gary responded, “They’re at Russ’.  They decided to stay up there.”  He came into our room and I was in bed in the dream.

When I woke up, the mattress went down on his side of the bed; I FELT the mattress go down when he was climbing in bed.  I know it sounds crazy, but it’s true.

I’ve had several of those kinds of dreams, and those dreams are hard.

Another one he came and was right in the bedroom by me again.  He said, “Joanne, I want you to see how perfect I am.”  He had had scars from his surgeries on his neck.  He said, “Look!” and I had to touch his skin on his neck and I touched it and there were no scars there!  In my dream one of our sons was living home and I told Gary that he had to go show our son how perfect he was.  It was so real.

As time went on, he started drifting further away from me in my dreams.

He would separate himself from me.  Once we were on a mountain or a big hill and he went ahead of me and he was on a bike (we didn’t ride bikes!).   Then he was away and sitting by himself on this mountaintop and I wanted to be with him, but he wanted to be by himself -- crazy things like that.

A little while after I met Jim (my current husband), on a Friday morning (I remember because I was going to go to breakfast with my sisters that day) I had another dream.  Gary was there that time too but when it was time for us to go apart I was thinking in my dream that Gary left me and was under a stairway and that was how he was leaving me.

When I came to I realized that I was leaving him. I was the one walking away from him.  Right after I met Jim was a week before the anniversary of Gary’s death that year.  I think my dreams reflected that my life was changing too.

Have you ever had dreams about someone that you’ve lost?  What were those like?  What do you think they might mean?