What Dreams are Made Of

It's 4:00am and I can't sleep. Not an altogether unusual occurrence, but not a welcome one either. But not being asleep does mean I'm not enduring another of my subconscious Twilight Zone episode-style dreams.

I've been having a recurring dream of late—well, the actual dream isn't recurring, but the theme and premise is—in which my late mother shows up alive. My science-fiction- and comic-book-reared brain knows that in those genres, death isn't necessarily a permanent state—Spock came back thanks to the regenerative properties of Project Genesis, Buffy was magically brought back by the Scoobies, Captain Jack Harkness dies and comes back all the time. In comicdom, characters are killed off and brought back as marketing ploys with annoying frequency; we used to say there were two kinds of dead comic characters, just-for-now-dead and "Bucky-dead." (We used to say that, because after decades Marvel even resurrected Bucky Barnes as the Winter Soldier, so even Bucky isn't Bucky-dead anymore.) Captain America, the Human Torch, Batman, two different Robins (with a third only thought dead), Doc Ock, and Wolverine are just the most recent characters that come to mind that have come back from the great beyond no worse for wear. Oh, and Phil Coulson. Tahiti is a magical place.

So I guess it's not surprising that my subconscious would generate a scenario like the one I was treated to lat night/this morning, that had both my mom and her husband returning because of some sort of time-dilation mumbo-jumbo during their travels, putting me in the awkward position of having to explain to them that I'd sold their house and depended on some of their money now, oh, and that this was going to seriously fuck up all the struggles I'd been going through with banks and fund managers to get control of their assets. In this dream scenario, I somehow also knew from the get-go that this was a short-term return, that the metaphysics of this mumbo-jumbo just meant I was going to have to go through them dying all over again, and in my mom's case, her finding out that their house was now owned by somebody else just prompted her to drink continually, berate me, and call me unprintable names.

Previous iterations of this dream-theme weren't so wholly unpleasant, in that in them I'm glad to see my mom again and then they veer into unpleasantness when the re-dying happens (it always happens, part of the theme). The details generally fade pretty quickly upon waking up, but the basic outlines remain.

I have, of course, been dealing with a great many entities and institutions since she passed away regarding assets and various executor-like things, most of which eventually got resolved after varying amounts of frustration and outrage. One remains unresolved, and as that item has been occupying a chunk of my waking time in recent weeks (lawyers and judges and probate, oh my) I guess my brain decided to use it as ready-material for REM movies.

Thanks a lot, brain.