I had an oddly vivid dream last night. I’m not a life-as-movie dream person: for example, I never showed up naked on book report day in my fourth grade classroom, or had a dream that could be confused with reality except that my husband was Paul Rudd wearing a horse’s head and green tights. Ahem.

My dreams are generally a primordial slime of images and confused settings that don’t make sense for the snippets of reality interspersed with them. When I wake up, what I am most often left with are intense emotions, pinned to only a few loosely-connected images that quickly fade into the background. Once in a while these floating emotions linger with me long enough to connect with something in the real world later that day, and those connections often form the first little seedlings of my stories and blogs.

Last night was an exception, though. I had a long, vivid dream which I remembered all morning, about the death of my father. When my dad actually died of lung cancer just over two years ago, I wasn’t with him. I had talked to him on the phone that evening, and he refused to allow me to come see him or to call an ambulance despite the fact that he didn’t sound well. I honored his wishes because I’d known this man my whole life, and knew better than anyone that his pride was the core of who he was. Going against his wishes at the end of his life would’ve been an enormous betrayal of trust, and gained him very little in the way of prolonged survival. And if I’m being very honest, I honored it for a more selfish reason: I was exhausted. Caring for a 3-week old and 2-year old while coping with a bout of post-partum depression left me very little energy for fighting one last battle with the stubbornest damn person I have ever known.

In the dream, however, I was with him. We were at my grandparents’ farm in Pelham, Georgia, the small rural town where both of my parents grew up. In the tradition of dreams, the house was not the simple two-bedroom cinderblock home it is in reality, but instead a rambling Southern mansion complete with Spanish moss on oak trees and a rambling wooden porch just outside the open windows. The air was thick with moisture and the green smells of a warm summer in Georgia. I could feel the breeze and see the slight movement of tattered lace curtains as it blew.

Dad was lying in a sickbed in the main living area of the house, frailer than I’ve ever seen him and covered with blankets. He was talking to me, giving me instructions of some kind, but I couldn’t hear them. I was busily running around the house, vaguely aware that I was trying to keep my two-year-old, Fozzie Bear, from breaking things and getting into trouble. For some reason I was also trying to get the house clean in preparation for a party. An old friend of mine from whom I’ve drifted apart in real life was there, too, running an extremely loud vacuum cleaner and shouting at me about the party plans. I couldn’t hear much of what she said, I couldn’t hear anything my dad was saying, and I kept losing sight of my toddler, who was running in and out of the house’s seemingly innumerable open doors, laughing.

As often happens when I am under stress, in the dream I began to shout at everyone to be quiet and let me think. I remember saying to my old friend, “Sweetie, you know I love you, but you MUST get out of here. I can’t listen to you right now.” Offended, she left in a huff, letting a screen door slam in her wake. I went back to the sick room and tried to hear Dad, but the closer I got to his room, the more the scene evaporated into nothingness. I could never hear what he said.

When I woke up, I had that weird sensation you have after losing a loved one, the one where you wake up and it takes your conscious mind a minute to get the rest of you up to speed. For a few heartbeats, you live in the world in which that person is still alive, and your fingers almost twitch with the desire to reach for the phone and call them. If you’ve lost someone close to you, you will know that feeling well. It fades over time, but never entirely goes away.

I have often looked back on my decision not to go to my father on the night he died and regretted it deeply. As we humans always do, I wanted to believe I had more time, that this couldn’t be it. He’d been sick for five months, but his condition had quietly worsened in those few days, a fact he didn’t want me to know and I didn’t want to believe. So instead of being able to say goodbye to him before he died, I saw him a few hours later under the harsh lights of the emergency room, where  the tubes and wires sat in testimony to the fact that the medical personnel had done everything they could. It’s comforting to me that my brother, who lived with Dad at the time, was with him when he died. But all my unasked questions, all unstated feelings, everything unfinished between us, will remain in a box in the attic for as long as I’m alive. The happy memories, the loving father, will be out on display so that my kids will know Dad as much as possible. Everything else will go into storage, because what else can you do with it?

Over a year later, circumstances forced me to sell the family farm that was the pseudo-setting for last night’s dream. The farm had been in our family since the late 1800’s and it was a heartbreaking choice to let it go. That place meant so much to Dad, and represented a big part of my heritage, for better or worse. Knowing he was dying, Dad asked me not to sell it, though I think even then part of him understood that I might have to do it anyway. For most of my life, I was a Daddy’s girl, and I spent a good part my youth trying to win his approval and defy his mandates by turns. It’s silly to say so, but I wish our parting interactions had been those of approval and concord, rather than my having to wrestle with his stubborn independence, only to disappoint his dying wish. I always wished he’d been able to verbalize in those last days what I half-knew, half-hoped to be true – that he loved me and my brother and my kids and hubs. That he was proud of us no matter what, and that our existence was legacy enough.

It’s never simple, is it? Death, love, loss, disappointment. Living every day with small choices we make in split seconds, or a few days, the consequences indifferent to what our state of mind happened to be at the time. The interpretation of dreams is a shaky business at best, even in the well-traveled roads of psychology. Generally, though, I tend to believe that dreams are the leftovers from the day that our mind hasn’t been able to process with its waking self. But nothing about that explains why they have to be so weird.

Thinking of last night’s dream, I could suggest a thousand possible meanings: from unfinished grief for my Dad to guilt about selling the farm, to a (never-to-be-fulfilled) wish that I were a better housekeeper. I’ll admit that a part of me wishes dreams like that one were a kind of open door to the spirit world, a chance to share what cannot be said with our departed friends and family, to ask for forgiveness and accept wisdom — even if it’s just from the part of that person we carry within ourselves.

What do you think? Do your dreams inform your waking life, provide an escape from it, or even predict what may happen next? Are they a source of inspiration or a reflection of anxiety and guilt?  Does anyone you love talk to you in your sleep?

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I’m M.J. (Manda) Pullen, an author, mom and former psychotherapist in the Atlanta, Georgia area. I blog with honesty and humor about writing, parenthood, psychology, life in general and the many lessons I’ve learned the hard way. If you enjoy reading this blog, please consider sharing it,  sign up for the RSS or monthly email updates  (and be entered in the monthly giveaway).
Comments are welcomed and appreciated. Thanks for reading!

MJ Pullen

M.J. Pullen is a distracted writer and the mom of two boys in Roswell, Georgia, where she is absolutely late for something important right now. Her books include quirky romantic comedies and playful women's fiction. She blogs erratically with writing advice, random observations, and reflections on raising very loud kids and dogs. Join her Distracted Readers newsletter list for updates, free content, giveaways and more.