I’ve never really been one for dreams. I’m about 1/3 of the way through a two-year spiritual direction training program, and we recently did a series on dreams and dream interpretation. what animals mean, what themes to pick up on, what our actions or tones could mean, and how we interact with our subconscious, and how our fears and hopes and desires play out across the timeline of our sleep.
this is not my thing. this is the opposite of my thing.
my friend’s mom has been having prophetic dreams for as long as I’ve known her – probably longer, if we’re being honest. she’s pretty much always known when my friend and I were dating losers, or when we were going to experience a big shift in life, either for good or for ill. she’s been known to pull close friends and family members aside with an explanation of a dream that seems very out of left field – and then it comes through, it comes true, and I cannot explain it.
this is not my thing. this is the opposite of my thing.
when my spiritual direction group was working on dreams last month, we were supposed to supply a recent dream we’ve had, to work on with a partner, and practice interpretation and application on each other. for the life of me I could not remember any one single dream. I often have bits and pieces, tiny fragments of a puzzle, where none of the cuts seem to make sense. an image here, a flash there, a snip of conversation. a lot of falling. not a lot of clarity.
this is SO not my thing. have I said that already?
but then this week, I’ve had some really bad migraines (which really is nothing new, but this week I did feel sick enough to stay home from work and sleep). and I’ve been sleeping more than usual because of that. I’ve had reoccurring dreams about my brother, who died in 2016. weird simply because I remember them – and also weird in their total lame normalcy.
I’ve been dreaming about arguing with my brother about cars.
specifically trying to decide if the new Ford Mustang Mach-E was worth the hype.
specifically debating whether it was worth naming this my “Dream Car” or if I should just take a back seat with my 2008 Audi TT of high school dreams.
for the record, I drive a 2011 Kia Sorento with two broken back doors. one door opens from the inside only. one door opens from the outside only. this is generally fine, as 97% of the time I’m the only one in the car – or it’s just Jon and me.
sometimes this causes tension, like when we’re unloading from a Costco run in our narrow garage and someone I might have loaded the car incorrectly. or when we’re picking friends up at the airport and no one can get the dang curbside door open from the outside while juggling carry on luggage.
we live an exciting life.
but when my brother was alive, he was the go-to car guy. I can’t remember ever purchasing a car without his input, advice, and reviews. he worked for a car company after college, and his job was to reverse engineer the competition. he knew cars up and down and backwards, literally. he could pick a car out of any scene from any movie and tell you the stats. he always knew when a “period car” was out of the timeline by a matter of months in movies and shows. he reveled in reviews, stats, crash ratings, etc, etc, etc.
I still am not convinced that this is a necessary thing.
I drive a car I like.
it’s a mid size SUV.
the end.
but my dream. it’s been three nights running.
I remember when my brother died, I was kind of longing for a dream. a chance to say goodbye. I’d not been able to be there when he died, for about his last 24 hours, and it’s still hard to be okay with myself for that, 4+ years later, I missed that last opportunity. I was there for a lot, at the end, and I’m very grateful. but still I was sort of longing for that dream, that visit. that goodbye.
arguing about cars is somehow exactly what I needed.
grief is strange. it’s expected, but it always catches us off guard. it comes to us all, and we long desperately for it not to. we try to avoid it – we laugh and bluster and bluff out way through it. we try like mad to make sure it doesn’t touch us. but it does – it always does. grief hits in unexpected ways, and while I wasn’t looking for a dream about my brother, it’s how I’m grieving now.
the passivity of grief is surprising too. I think about my brother often, daily; but it’s subsided from a raw, wrenching, ripped open sore, into a longing ache that never quite heals over. I miss his jokes and his sarcasm and his crooked little smile, his encyclopedic knowledge of books, Star Trek, football, all aircraft everywhere, cars, and sharks. and I’m finding, I miss arguing with him. so perhaps even a brief dream, vivid and real, arguing about the Ford Mustang Mach-E, is a good way to remember him for a season.
perhaps the greater 