gift of a dream

The other night I had a pretty significant dream… enough to write it down, something I rarely do. Here’s what I wrote:

Dreamt that my dad and I were looking at the stars at the old house, kinda reminiscing [my parents were both astronomy buffs]. [My wife] was there too.
It was cool, I asked him about a (fictitious) grouping of stars and he remembered “discovering” a constellation that when we were little we called “Lion’s Head”. Intrigued, since I had a dim recall about this, I began to ask him questions about that memory (was it north of Scorpio) and after a few questions he seemed to get a little agitated. Then [my wife] asked him some kind of sensitive question and it seemed to feed his mood. He was ranting and his mood was dark – at one point he exclaimed “I fucking hate him!” and I knew he was talking about his dad. I was lying on the ground, still looking at the stars, and I let his anger wash over me, and I let myself remember being little, in bed, and afraid of my dad in the midst of an angry spell, afraid of the next impulsive act, loud noise, broken thing. I actually had a feeling of gratitude for the opportunity to do this, in the midst of the dream. I wasn’t actually afraid of my dad, but I let myself feel that remembered fear because I wanted to.

Since I recall so little of the abusive stuff from my childhood, this dream was a real gift. It sounds odd to say that since it was not a pleasant memory by any stretch, and yet, this is exactly the kind of thing I’ve been looking to reconnect with. I never had any delusions that recovery would be pleasant.

Since then I have gone back through some old photos of me as a kid and my dad from that time. I definitely see him in a new light – not with anger or anything, but for the weak man he was at that time. He has been sober for a very long time now and he has been a solid presence in my life. And oddly enough that helps make it harder to remember things like this, because I think on some level I’m not willing to tarnish my image of him. But that kind of denial is half of the problem – he is who he is, and he was who he was.