Most of the dreams about my wife, who died five years ago today, are textbook Freud. I am always looking for her — in high-rise apartment buildings where I cannot remember the apartment number, or in a labyrinth of city streets where I lose my way. I never find her of course and I wake in a panic of fear and loneliness.

Just once, a while back, I actually did find her. I had been looking for her in a high-rise building, an apartment building or maybe a hospital, going from floor to floor, knocking on doors, calling out her name — and then — there she was, in a bed which was in the middle of a corridor.

“I’ve been looking for you everywhere,” I said, “thank God I found you.”

She held out her hand. “It’s okay now, here I am.”

I woke up with a surreal feeling of hope and expectation and turned to the pillow next to mine. It was empty, of course.

That was the only time. Nothing since. I guess I should be content with that. But the dreams continue. When I wake, they slow down my day, they slow down my life, they prevent me from ‘getting on with my life’ as some people urge me to do.

But I cannot do that. I must be sick in the head. No person has ever had such an impression on me. And I cannot tell her so. I will never be able to do that.

The worst part of the dreams and the daily aftermath is the predictable feeling of enormous guilt that, in life, I treated her so casually and cavalierly and sometimes downright shitty. If only I had known. But I suppose many people end up with similar feelings about dead companions and soul mates. People tell me not to keep ‘beating myself up over it’ — well-meaning words that mean nothing. I condemn myself to hell.

So be it.

I could look for her in labyrinthine cities and endless corridors for another five years and nothing would change.

In those five years, I hope the conscious mind becomes one with the subconscious and the subconscious becomes one with the supernatural, and this whole bloody farce begins to make sense.

🔝