the trouble with dreams

The part where I dream of him every night has commenced. Every night, or nearly every night, often enough that it feels like a nightly event, as if my unconscious has a regularly scheduled date for pernoctation, I dream of Donny.

Mostly, in my dreams Donny is moving out, despite the fact that we never lived together. In my dreams, he’s packing boxes, or he’s surrounded by boxes already stacked and packed, and I am struck by both the visual of a nearly vacated room and the feel of a room made new by its echo. In my dreams, I wonder where I’m going to put things, how I’m going to fill the space, now that he has moved out. (Before we broke up, I had all these dreams that I had two apartments, one I lived in and one I didn’t. In my dream, I got eviction notices for both; I felt stress about how I’d pay for both of my homes, especially the empty one.)

I’ve had other dreams where we’re just together, doing stuff; stuff is done by us, and we are there. There’s nothing special about the dream. No penguins or uncanny architecture. No bones or flying or bullets or bodies. No dwarfs or she-males. Just us, talking, doing stuff, and the pervading sense that the end is unquestionably nigh. I’ve had dreams where we fought, and in them we fought with a kind of spitting primal anger we never had in waking life. I’ve had dreams of Donny, lots of them, of late; my mind works overtime to process this loss.

(I also had a dream that in this highly posh, art deco L.A. hotel, Naomi Watts seduced me. She pulled me down onto a velvet divan the color of an arterial spray. She was wearing silk of a color somewhere between ecru and lemon. She kissed me and held my face in her cool, narrow-fingered hands, and the room swirled and morphed and somehow I was in her bed, all crisp, white linen and bolstered headboard swathed in yet more arterial velvet.

She and I were kissing and touching, undressing one another with our hands, and suddenly her husband Liev Schrieber was there also, undressed but for his boxers. I looked at Naomi, who nodded her ascent and then reclined on her side to watch me slide Liev's boxers off over his cock, already swollen and hard as a dehiscent fruit. I got this vivid view of his abdomen carpeted with bristly hairs, my hands shorts sliding his boxers down, the shiny-taut toasty-pink skin of his glans, and his moon-shaped face watching. My mouth nearly watered with the prospect. But then, as dreams do, it got mussed by the appearance of two more people, one a male-male, one a she-male, and in my dream I made my regrets. A threesome with Naomi and Liev was one thing; a five-some was something entirely something bigger than my unconscious mind could wrap itself around. They were very polite, if disappointed.)

This oneiric processing of the emotional break-up is nothing new for me. After I broke up with C, I spent seven long, heart-wrenching years dreaming about him. My C-related dreams were unequivocally painful, involving as they did my dreamed obsession with him: us meeting unbeknownst to his wife and sharing some brief fucking passion in a strange apartment; my breaking into his house and poring through his things, touching his photos like totems; my stumbling across him and his wife in flagrante delicto, and feeling a blaze of delicious horror. These were always painful dreams. I often woke up weeping.

At some point near the end of those seven years, I dreamt of C and I told him how often I dreamed of him and how I would wake up in tears. I knew as I was telling him that the dreams would soon end. They did. I can now see C, and I feel affection for him. I feel gratitude. The ghost of our years together and our love beyond reason colors the room, hovering in the milky distance, but I don’t feel pain. His life is not mine, and I feel thankful for that. In those seven years after we broke up, I never thought I’d get to this point, and yet here I am, able to stand on a peninsula and see C-land, off in the distance, wave a cheerful hello and then walk away with neither insouciance nor sadness.

Someday, I’ll get to that point with Donny, but it’ll be a while. I’m feeling better than I was. I’m now nearly funk-free; I’m able to do the things I need to do without feeling like they’re bigger than I am. I am no longer so distracted that I feel immersed in the Donny-fug, like it’s swirling about me all emo-miasma and clouding my vision. I’m able, from time to time, to see clearly. And then there are my dreams working overtime. (Over time, they will fall away like leaves. Over time, I’ll grow a new pearl where Donny once was.)

I don’t have sex dreams about Donny. But I can still smell his scent, evanescent as water, sweet like beech trees. I can still feel his fingers, and I can still remember the way he kissed. Someday, those details will fall away too. Fall like fluff and stick somewhere, anywhere, but not here in my consciousness.

Comments

[b]

That was so beautiful, Chelsea. I'm coming up on a year now since saying goodbye to one who I thought was the love of my life, and the experience of letting him go has been a lot like you describe, although I have not had any dreams that I can remember. I have watched myself go through this and noted the stages of grief as they come and go. At first it was like pulling a sword out of my heart, one painful centimeter at a time. Those were the acutely painful months. Then the pain was more like a rock that simply sat on my chest, making it difficult to breathe or move. That phase lasted a very long time. Then at around the 7 month point, the heavy feeling seemed to shift to a more comfortable position on my shoulders, strapped to me like a backpack I could never put down, and breathing impolitely in my ear. And lately, I have begun to feel that the weight of the loss is finally no longer resting on my shoulders or anywhere else on me, but hovering a few feet above and behind me, such that I can still sense it there, but it no longer burdens me. I can pick and choose when to think about it and when not to. I am working now on the breakup no longer branding me, defining me. And I'm eagerly anticipating that first day when I will not think of him at all. That day is definitely getting closer. Still though, it's tough for me to imagine the day when I'll be able to wave a cheerful hello at the memories in the distance, as you can with C. But your words give me a hopeful vision to anticipate. My heart goes out to you as you walk that long path of letting go and moving on.

[Pete]

CG,
A great painting with words, so colorful and evocative.
Pete

[J.J. Adler]

Amazing what grief can be like, isn't it? In this case, it's not a death, but it's still a loss. And it comes out in so many different ways... dreams, sensing a presence, physical stress, you name it. Thanks for sharing this with us.

[marianne]

Wow...

A year after a painful parting, I keep telling myself that I have to work harder to forget, to let go. Reading this has made me realize the obvious... that there is still work to be done, and I'll be able to 'wave from a distance' when I'm ready, not before.

Beautifully written and evocative.