bad dreams

I had a bad dream last night, or, more accurately, early this morning. My mother, rather a woman who was acting as if she was my mother, but I knew she wasn't, was walking in the middle of rush hour traffic. I was angry with her because I was just leaving for a trip and had to set it aside (literally, I put the car by the side of the road) and take her back to her apartment with Dad, full knowing that she wasn't my mother but some actress badly playing my mother. She didn't know me, didn't have any interest in me. And my dad was also playing his part by pretending she was Mom, too. Well, I think that is a way I am still playing out my last two years or so of life with Mother as she slipped into childlike dementia that we could no longer deny. There's a part (no pun intended, but there it is) of me that worries I will go out the same way.

Mom didn't much care about us in her last years. I think part of dimentia was a self-centeredness that is uncontrollable. And her girlishness which charmed Dad in their marriage became the dominant part of her personality. I am grateful she didn't turn mean, although when she was in the hospital, she could turn mean and I heard foul language come out of her mouth that I didn't think she even knew how to verbalize.

All this rumination from a bad dream. I need to let it go and focus on the day--my morning swim, lunch with Mark and Aron, driving (solo) to get my badly needed haircut and packing for our trip.

Last night, the first of the post-monsoon sunsets appeared all pink, blue, grey with a fingerlike arc of rainbow over Sabino Canyon. The heat is necessary to bring us the rains and so I welcome those clouds with the promise of what (we all hope) is a good chubasco season. Maybe my bad dream came from this "stirred up" place where the negative ions fissure the psyche and repressed feelings bubble up like lava. I will accept the shift of the psyche and assimilate it into my awareness while, at the same time, letting it fade into the consciousness of today.