Wednesday, August 28, 2013

Dreams of Divorce


This morning I was bothered by dreams of my parents’ divorce. Why?

I suppose that I could blame James Bond: I watched the latest Bond, Skyfall, again last night and was again brought to tears by its themes of death and loss; it is an uncommonly deep Bond. In Skyfall, the past is something to be respected and held — but only a little bit, only insofar as it motivates you to action in the present. More often, the past is something to be obliterated without mercy, or something to be used as shield to prevent your own obliteration. In Skyfall, the past is meant to be put down, before it puts you down. More important than anything else, the past is not something to get sentimental about. For all of its power to wreak destruction in the here and now, it is something that you approach only rarely, and then with extreme caution.

Skyfall may be the most remarkable James Bond movie ever, if you look beyond the explosions. Certainly it resonates with me, focussing as it does on the loss of M (the only mother figure Bond ever had) and of Bond’s childhood home in one stroke.

Still, it’s hardly reason that my dreams should be affected this morning on the subject at hand.

My parents, I think, were breaking up almost from the moment they got married. They were breaking up certainly as long as I was alive. It just took them forty years.

Still, not enough to provoke the harrowing scenes that played out behind my eyes this morning.

I have to ask also, why, when my mother invades my sleep, does it always happen in the morning hours when I am in that middle-ground, trancelike state that is halfway between sleep and waking? Is she out there somewhere, still trying to influence me? Is she still, in some purgatory, re-hashing the past over and over again? It would be Just Exactly “Like” her not to let go of old regrets and resentments. She never did in life. 

I can only lay claim to one or two “psychic” experiences in my lifetime, and both of them happened in the morning, when I was between sleep and waking. It gives me cause to wonder. Just wonder, that’s all. I wish that I could say to her, “It’s time to let go. I don’t want to have any more dreams about your regrets.”

I have enough of my own.

— Freder.
www.ducksoup.me

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