Mom & Me Four Archive

    I retired at sometime between 0230 and 0300, Mom having retired late, as well. We'd had a good day: I'd finished shopping for ingredients for Thanksgiving dinner and had successfully lit Mom's excitement about it. She and I retired feeling great.
    The dregs of the dream awoke me at 0356 (I looked at the clock).
    The dream took place in what I take to be a suburban housing development. Mom and I were living in a ranch style house with an expansive, grassy front lawn; I'm not sure which state we were in, but the weather was summery; not hot summery like the Phoenix metroplex, though. One of my sisters (I don't think it matters which one) had arrived to stay with my mother for some hours while I was performing some sort of out-of-home errand. I remember spending a large part of the dream instructing her on the kind of attention that needed to be paid to Mom.
    I arrived home to find that my sister had passed the care of my mother off to someone else in the neighborhood and taken her to that home. I was shocked and upset but spent little time expressing this. My sister and I immediately went to the house in question to retrieve Mom.
    Mom wasn't there. The woman (unidentified in the dream) who'd volunteered to watch Mom explained that Mom had wandered off. She'd assumed that Mom had "gone home".
    I was thrown into a panic. I assigned my sister to stay at the house, in case Mom managed to find her way back home by default. I headed out searching for Mom; checking back periodically to see if she had arrived home. On the third check, while I was dumping on my sister about her carelessness with and lack of attention to Mom (I remember asking her in the dream why she had volunteered to be with Mom when she had no intention of performing the watch herself), the doorbell rang.
    There was Mom, at the door, dressed in an outfit that she used to own, in reality, and in which we have a picture, somewhere, of her mowing the the front lawn at the farm she and my father owned in Wichita Falls: A red 1980's type polyester outfit with bright red pants and a red and white jacquard, short sleeved, front button-down blouse. Her hair, as well, was styled the same as she wore it, in reality, at that time, and had not yet grayed. She stood at the door with a stricken look on her face, her arms folded tightly across her chest, just below her breasts.
    I approached her to lead her into the house, with much expressed relief. She backed away, arms remaining in the same position, turned and headed across the lawn parallel to the house. I went after her, caught up to her, took hold of one of her hands to lead her back to the house and her arm detached, mid-upper arm, from her body. I was horrified. I rounded her, stopped her in flight and discovered that her other arm had been similarly detached. It was as though her arms had been pulled, to drastically thin the upper arm, then cut, the incisions lasered closed (they were neatly done and completely healed), and her arms stuffed back into the sleeves of her shirt. I immediately "saw", in my mind, in the dream, the culprit who had done this to her; a bald man, tall, hefty, muscular; no one I would recognize in real life, but, in the dream I knew who he was; the husband of the neighbor with whom my sister had left Mom.
    Mom and I were beside ourselves with horror and shock and grief. I replaced her arms into her sleeves, recrossed them over her chest and pulled her into a close embrace, during which we both wailed and sobbed while my sister looked on, detached, from the porch of the house.
    This is when I awoke. I hadn't been dreaming long enough to begin sobbing in reality while I was dreaming, but immediately upon awakening I started to sob.
    The dream so astonished me that I immediately reviewed all I could remember and made careful mental notes to record later. It took me awhile to settle myself down and return to sleep.
    I have no idea what the dream "means". I imagine I'll speculate on this, although I'll let the meaning creep casually up from just-outside-of-conscious-attention. I assume the elements will organize themselves, attach to ingredients in my sub-un-conscious soup and create some Aha! moments over the next few days. Or, maybe not. Sometimes dreams, for me, go only as far as REM and no further. We'll see what happens.
    Terrifying, startling dream, though, especially in the context of the last few days, which have been laid back and easy going on all the levels of which I can think, at the moment.
    Time to awaken the Mom.
    Later.