Lots of times when I have dreams, it’s not so much what happens as how I feel when they happen. Sometimes people don’t look like the the people who I know they are and places are the same way, but I know who and what they are and I just go with it. I don’t know what that means, but I’m sure that will come up quite a bit.
My wife was nice enough to let me get some much needed sleep. She made a wonderful supper of (that’s funny, I never call it supper, eventhough my grandparents always did) scallops and rice. Being incredibly satiated, I went upstairs and fell into a near-immediate sleep.
Lots of stuff happened before, but the part I remember most is being in a room that I assume was where Grampa died. It was a huge hospital room and I remember Aunt Kim being there, which she wasn’t able to make it in reality. I was sitting in a corner just kind of watching the proceedings. I had cried quite a bit beforehand because I think I had an idea of what was going on, even if I wasn’t supposed to in my dream. Like my real consciousness realized what was going on even if my dreaming consciousness didn’t. Another thing that was interesting in retrospect, I’m pretty sure my dream consciousness was supposed to be that of a child.
Like I said, I was sitting in the corner and I had been crying, but that’s because I kind of knew what was going on. It was like my real self was trying to drive the dream forward and say everything to Grampa that I wanted to say, eventhough my dreaming self didn’t really know. Eventhough Grampa was in the hospital bed, he was over in the corner talking to me. I had the distinct feeling that the people in the room knew that his spirit or whatever was over there because, to them, I was talking to myself. I remember my mother crying because she saw me talking to myself and knew I was talking to Grampa.
An Asian-looking doctor came in and started asking Aunt Kim questions. She went into a whole jargon-laced schpeal about what had happened, as she would, and the two of them had a cute little doctor banter. I kind of fuzzed the conversation out because they were using words that I didn’t understand – like a child would – eventhough I was very interested in what they were saying. They talked for a little bit and then I looked back at Grampa in front of me.
He didn’t quite look like Grampa and that bothered my dream-self. It was like my dream-self knew that he was dead and that he was visiting me, and my dream-self was worried that maybe he wasn’t in the right place. I was worried he was in Hell or just a place that wasn’t Heaven. He knew that I had that thought and I pushed it out of my dream-self’s head quickly because I knew Grampa didn’t want me to think like that. It was like there was something else going on, but it wasn’t as important as the visit, so we both silently agreed not to talk about it.
I reached over with my hand and felt his hair. I remember wondering if this was how he viewed himself and this is how he was spending the rest of his existence. Like if this was a younger him and it was closer to how he pictured himself than how he looked to us, so this was how he was going to spend his afterlife. He had some hair on top, but it was very short and thinning. I just felt his hair for a while and he smiled.
I remember this very distinctly. He said, “Do ya love my body?”
I said no in a whisper and started to cry a little bit. He got a little surprised look on his face and said, “Do ya love my muscles?”
I smiled and said yes. He gave me a big “Well then,” and began to explain how the muscles in the forearm were like something about a car and explained this and that about them. I kind of fuzzed it out, but I was paying attention because I knew he was going to blow up his muscle in his forearm for me.
Grampa always had this little trick where he’d put his thumb in his mouth and turn and flex his arm so that part of his muscle near his elbow would appear to blow up into a round balloon. I think it was one of his favorite things to do. He wasn’t able to do it much as I got older, but I remember him blowing up his muscle for me a lot when I was a kid. I hadn’t thought about that for many years, but it was so wonderfully beautiful in my dream that I was excited to see it.
Aunt Kim was still talking to the doctor and he asked about Grampa’s shoulder surgery, but I wasn’t paying attention in my dream because I was with Grampa. I think must have been laying down when he was blowing up his muscle because it felt like I went to sleep afterwards. Like he was laying down a child to go to sleep and that was the last little trick to calm them down. I was going to say something more to Grampa, but then I woke up.
My first thought was to check to see if I had been crying in real life as much as I was in my dream. Last week or so I had had another Grampa dream and I was simply balling in my dream and screaming out, but I didn’t know if I was doing it in real life. I had asked Angie if she remembered me talking in my sleep or anything, but she didn’t know because she was sleeping. This time there was just a few tears in one eye.
My second thought was that it was a wonderful dream. I tried to go back to sleep, but I kind of didn’t want to. Usually my dreams aren’t so great, and this one was so fulfilling, it really only would have been downhill from there. I really wanted to tell someone about it, but it was 2 AM, so here I am.
