It was a seemingly normal morning in many respects. Having been upset the night before about the recent changes in his life, my eldest was apprehensive about going back to school and claimed to be ill. I agreed that he could have a day off (highly unlike me, alarm bells should have rung at that point). We took my youngest to school and we returned home.
We walked across the garden and noticed that the neighbours’ fences had half burned down one side, and entirely collapsed on the other. We were more surprised by the football-sized snails that crawled around them, but not so concerned that it distracted us from moving on quickly to the pool for a swim.
After our dip we returned across the garden, which was now covered in a golden, lightly-patterned silky eiderdown. This seemed a little odd, but not remarkably so.
Back in the kitchen, I made my usual smoothie. I had filled to cup so full that the fruit and vegetable juices dripped down the sides as it whirled.
Then my phone rang.
It wasn’t a number I recognised, but the voice was the chillingly familiar.
In her characteristic slightly abrupt manner, she said ‘hello’ and asked what I had been up to. She immediately talked over my reply in that ever-so-familiar way.
Vivid feelings of numbness and disbelief chilled my body, as my head tried to reconcile the truth of the voice at the end of the phone and the other truth that that person was buried 6-foot underground. The words coming out of my mouth appeared to adapt to this peculiar situation with relative ease, but my body was shit-scared.
I asked her where she was, where had she been? Mum said she’d just been away for three weeks, maybe three months with a friend and Keith (presumably her brother-in-law) and his new girlfriend. I asked ‘where’, where had she been? Her answer, ‘oh just Compton’.
She then said we should meet up. And I said yes, that we had moved and that I had my youngest at home with me (for it was my youngest was sitting on the sofa nearby, not my eldest). I suggested we met in town, but she hesitated and said that would be too busy and that too many people would see her. She said she would come to my new house
She then mentioned something about being cold, and the phone call ended.
******
I have never had a dream like it — so far removed from reality and yet so intimately close. I have never wanted so much for a dream, however scary, to be the reality.
I woke up in that usual fitful, deeply anxious state that one so often experiences in those first uncomfortable seconds of wake. Those few moments where the brains wrestles with reality, with the power of the subconscious mind, with the dirty tricks the brain can play on us in our sleep.
I started seriously worrying about my mental health, that someone so full of common sense and with such a firm grip on reality (boringly so sometimes), could hallucinate in this way. Then I began the process of committing the dream to conscious memory.
Every… small… detail.
I worked so hard I could genuinely feel the brain working, I saw the cogs turning, but the memory was already fading… Who was the friend she was with? She’d said the name, but the memory had already gone. Although it was a phone call, there were some visuals of her on that phone somewhere, she was outside I think but where? There was a vague recollection of other people in the swimming pool, there were conversations… but they’d gone.
As is so often the case, the strongest memories in those first few minutes of wake related to the physicality of the emotions experienced throughout. The paralysing numbness, the confusion, the petrifying shivers down my spine and in my hands… because they lingered on. The dream fire had burned bright and vividly, it burned the garden and the fences, it burned most of what was said. But in the aftermath, amidst the embers, this great fear remained present in every part of my physical being.
Grief is truly terrifying.
