A different and unusual, usual sort of dream

It’s not unusual for me to sleep a bit later on a Saturday morning. In fact, I’ve probably been doing that ever since I stopped wanting to get up to watch cartoons. Most of the time, it’s just a bit of sleep, but yesterday was a bit different, and unusual.

I had a sort of serial dream, and the first unusual thing is that I remember it at all. The second unusual thing was the fact it was a serial: I’d wake up from the dream, fall back to sleep and enter another chapter of the dream.

While I don’t remember all the details (and that’s definitely not unusual), I remember the gist of it: Nigel arrived at my house, apparently all healed and healthy, and only vaguely aware that he’d been in hospital, unconscious, for more than two years. The dream didn’t explain how all that worked, nor why I didn’t know about it—it was a dream, after all—but it seemed perfectly plausible within the context of the dream.

I was ecstatic with joy to be back with Nigel, of course, and I didn’t want to leave his side. I was aware, in the dream, that I was talking to him in a way that, in the dream, I knew was the result of everything I’ve learned from mourning him over that time. Nigel seemed to notice (I think he said something about it), and he wanted to spend time with me, maybe because of it? I’m not clear about that.

The one thing that was jarring was about a thing. I said something about wanting to hang some pendant lights I bought for the kitchen, and Nigel said he saw when I bought them, but I knew that was impossible: I bought them within the first six months I’d been in this house, while he was (in the dream) missing in hospital. I thought that maybe he’d found them on the shelves in the garage where they are in real life, but I knew that what he said implied something different. I shrugged and ignored it.

And those are the only specifics I remember out of the three or four “chapters” of the dream. However, there was absolutely nothing sad about the dream, and I didn’t cry in it or when I woke up. Instead, the whole thing was really pleasant.

There’s nothing more to unpack in the dream: It was mainly just a pleasant dream. In real life, from time to time I think about having the pendant lights installed, something I haven’t done because of multiple lockdowns making that impossible and leading me to forget about them when it was possible. In addition, I’ve had second-thoughts about them several times, like they’re not really what I wanted to get. However, I can’t recall thinking about them recently.

I think the real-life context is that, in real life, I’m keenly aware that I’ll never get Nigel or our life back, so this dream was the slightly surreal way it could kind of happen. That’s a thing at all because I recently have come to realise that it’s time for me to focus on building my solo life, and that’s the reason I’ve done so many household projects over the past few weeks: They’ve been about getting rid of stuff that was Nigel’s that make no sense for me to hold on to in my solo life.

Sometimes a dream is just a dream, and nothing more. This one was pleasant enough, but I think it also pointed to what it my evolving reality, and I’m fine with that. I mean, I didn’t cry or anything, and instead was perfectly fine. Still, yesterday’s dream was a bit different, and unusual. And that was okay.