Nightmares

In my dream, Mike had come back.  It was my job to keep an eye on him while Mom and Dad were out.  I let him out of my sight for just a few minutes, and he drove off in his car.  I was frantically running around looking for him.  He had left another suicide note, written at the bottom of his last one.  I found it on the counter, looking out the window at the ocean.  When my parents got back, I had to tell them that he was gone.  Then I found myself talking to him in the next room, trying to talk him out of it.  But it wasn’t Mike—it was my daughter, telling me that she wants to die, too.  Then I wake up.

It doesn’t take a PhD in psychology to interpret that dream. 

The first part is telling me that there was nothing I could have done to stop him.  My conscious mind doesn’t completely believe that there was nothing I could have done.  It’s still stuck in “if only…”  I suppose my subconscious mind has to keep trying to hammer that point home until I get it.

The second part is my fear of something happening to Dolly.  Since Mike died, my anxiety level has increased dramatically.  I have a strong fear of losing someone else I love, which I really couldn’t handle right now.  I find myself being a little obsessive and over-protective of Dolly at times.  I also try to tell my family that I love them as often as possible.

I have nightmares almost every night.  In the beginning, my dreams were violent and twisted, often involving decapitation, which sort of makes sense considering how Mike died. I’ve had a lot of dreams about my parents getting killed, which again is fear of something happening to someone else in my family.  Mostly I have dreams about Mike.  In one dream he was Mike as a little boy, and he had become friends with Dolly.  I was watching them through a window, but couldn’t keep track of them.  In the dreams where he dies, I’m never able to get to him in time.  In the dreams where he is alive, I have to face his death again as soon as I wake up.