Something left you last night. Not in the sense of loss — though there is grief in it, and the grief is real and belongs there. In the sense that something which had been entirely internal, entirely private, entirely carried within the specific container of you and only you — crossed a threshold and became…
Something is growing in you. Not literally. You know that. But the dream knew something the waking mind has been managing around — something that has been developing quietly, taking up space, requiring resources, changing the internal landscape in ways you haven’t fully named yet. The body in the dream was pregnant. The thing it…
You felt it. Not the memory of it. Not the brain reconstructing what it used to feel like from stored information, assembling the sensation from its components the way memory assembles images. The actual thing. The specific weight of her arms, the particular way she held, the quality of her warmth and the warmth of…
You knew. They didn’t. That asymmetry — that specific gap between what you were carrying in the dream and what they were carrying — is the thing that makes this dream different from every other grief dream, and the thing that makes the waking from it carry a particular weight that is hard to name…
You didn’t know. That’s the specific quality of it — the thing that makes this dream different from every other grief dream. In the other ones you know. You see them and you know they’re dead and the knowing is part of the weight, part of what the dream is carrying. But in this dream…
You’ve been waiting. Not consciously, not every night with deliberate effort — though sometimes that too, falling asleep trying to hold their face clearly enough that maybe the dream will find them. But underneath the ordinary functioning of daily life, underneath the grief that has become part of the texture of every day, there is…
There is a specific kind of alone that arrives when the last parent dies. Not the alone of isolation — you may have people around you, a partner, children, friends who love you and are present. Not the alone of being unloved. Something more structural than either of those. Something that most people who have…
You typed it into the search bar and maybe didn’t finish the sentence. Deceased mother. Deceased father. Deceased friend. Deceased husband. The word after it almost doesn’t matter — what matters is the question underneath, the one that brought you here at whatever hour this is, the one that has a specific weight to it…
You’ve had vivid dreams before. You know what they feel like — the ones that stay for a few minutes after waking and then dissolve, leaving nothing but a vague impression and the faint sense that something was happening. You know how ordinary dreams work. You know the difference between the brain generating noise and…