Unreality

I looked back at my last post. I noticed the strange reversal of these days, a reversal of all the symbolism that literature and liturgy make of the rotations of this, our planet. For normally, mornings mean hope, and the evening is the harbinger of the "terrors of the night." But for me in these days, the evenings are tinged with hope, and the mornings are when I feel the most powerless.

There is a good reason for this. Unreality. Unreality scares us. Most of the time, the dreams of sleep are more unreal than our daily lives. And so there can be a dark foreboding as we are forced to enter a state where we lose much control of our thought and sensation. "Procul recedant somnia, et noctium phantasmata."

But for the bereaved—or at least for Lewis and myself—the day feels more unreal than the dreams of night.

Lewis makes the connection when speaks of his experience as a "nightmare unreality." His lived experience is comparable to a fearful dream. Similarly, many of Heidi's friends, both local and Michigander, spoke to me of this whole experience of losing Heidi as being "surreal." We are all in denial: this simply is no longer the real world.

For me, night feels more real, probably because of the dreams supplied by a subconscious that refuses to catch up. The other day, Monica and I began the process of taking down Christmas decorations. We didn't quite finish (grief, as Lewis points out, is lazy). We still have to take down the small artificial tree upstairs. During the night, though, in my dreams, I saw Heidi taking it down and moving the student desk that it was on back downstairs, placing it where it was before Christmas. Then she moved it a little, stepped back, examined its placement, moved it a little again, etc... all while everyone else was doing other things. She may have even done that thing she used to do in deep thought, when she would rub her thumbnail back and forth across her lower lip—I don't know if I dreamed that or if my mind supplies that now. In the dream, I was talking to a child; I only noticed Heidi in the background. I do remember feeling joyful at noticing she was there, but in the dream, I did not know why. Otherwise, it was as real and natural an experience as our daily life was only six weeks ago.

The days, now, on the other hand, feel so off. It is hard to come to grips with the fact that our family count is six, not seven. It is hard to come to grips with the fact that Heidi will not come back at some point. Everything just feels weird, and a bit uncomfortable. And lost.

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