Dreams

The night before last, I had a spellbinding dream, one of those dreams that seems to last forever.  Maybe is lasted five minutes, maybe it last a few hours.  I don't know.  I woke up once and as is the case with those type of dreams, I consciously and successfully fell back asleep so I could continue the dream.

In the dream, Tracy and I were driving with my mom, location and destination unknown to me.  I was driving and we all were as we are now, my mom in her current state, although I think she could walk and her physical disability wasn't as pronounced as in real life.  There was no wheelchair anywhere to be seen.

Here's the thing - we were lost.  I recall trying to navigate  using my cell phone as I drove, but I just couldn't get accurate directions to where we wanted to go.  My mom was beside me in the car - it was a sedan - and Tracy was in the back seat, trying to help me navigate.  None of us were particularly upset.  We were just confused and, well, lost.  I kept missing turns and it felt like, at times, that I was driving near downtown, on the interstate, in a strange city.  I didn't know which interstate or bypass to take.  

We stopped at a stranger's house and, somehow, she got in the front seat on the driver's side of the car, with my mom between us.  As she tried to give us directions, my mom gently pawed at her hair, shoulder and chest.  The woman was relatively tolerant but a little surprised, until I told her my mom had Alzheimer's.  She nodded and looked knowingly and sympathetically at me.  

At some point, perhaps after the rain woke me up briefly and I fell back into the dream, we were all riding a bicycle, still lost.  I was steering and pedaling, Tracy was behind me giving me directions and my mom was on the back of the bicycle.  I was terribly afraid she would fall off, but somehow she didn't. 

I found myself pedaling the bike in the grass along side a road I knew I needed to be on, but I couldn't get to it.  I was on the wrong side of a chain link fence that seemed to have no discernible end.  I couldn't find a way to get us onto the road.  I felt helpless.

In the last scene of the dream before I woke up, the three of us were sitting in a booth in a restaurant. My mom was beside me.  She looked at me and said plaintively and a wistfully, "I want to go home."  

She said it again.  "I want to go home."

"I know you do, mom," I said.  "I know you do."  

I woke up as the dream ended.  it was 3:00 a.m.  I got out of bed and walked around our house in the silence and darkness, determined to remember as many details of the dream as I could.  

What did it mean?  Maybe nothing.  Maybe everything.  

I want my mom to go home, too.