recurring
a couple months before he passed, we bought a hospital bed for my dad. he hated because it gave him nightmares, but he couldn’t breathe well if he wasn’t propped up. to this day, i wonder what he dreamed of and i wonder why i had never asked.1
i’ve always been a vivid dreamer, and i unfortunately have many recurring nightmares that have haunted me since childhood. they’ve followed me across each of the three continents i’ve lived in & i’ve never been able to be rid of them.
in one that i remember well, i'm always a child. i’m spindly and small before a long rickety rope bridge. it stretches across a wide canyon that i don’t see the bottom of. i can hear the growling of wild animals & the scraping of their claws against the stone behind me, but i’ve never been brave enough to look back to see them. i have no choice but to run across the chasm to escape.2
the wood always breaks beneath me as i reach the end of the bridge. if i’m lucky, my fingers brush the cliffside and by some surge of adrenaline, i can hang on. in many of the other recurring runs, when i’m unlucky, i am consumed. either by the void or hot breath and gnashing teeth. regardless of the ending – i’d wake up to the feeling of my heart plummeting in my chest.
whenever i had this nightmare as a kid, i’d tumble out of bed, crying & seeking the comfort of my parents. i’d make the long journey from my room to theirs, downstairs, playing hopscotch with the moonlight through the window pane. (i was convinced that it would keep me safe from whatever i’d imagined in the shadows.) then, as gently as a 6-year-old could, i’d climb into bed between them and clutch the hem of my dad’s shirt like a lifeline. i believed it would draw him into my dreams, so i wouldn’t have to face them alone.
in the version of the dream he joins me in, he is asleep in a wheelchair. it plays out the same, except i have to push him across the bridge. still, his presence is more blessing than burden. somehow, i am able to run faster than before. driven by a motivation to keep the both of us alive3, i’m finally able to make it all the way across.
to this day, i wonder what my dad did when he woke from nightmares. rather, what could he have done? he barely had the strength to go to the bathroom on his own. he couldn’t even raise his voice to wake up my mom to ask for help. he had no way to leave that bed by himself. how lonely must he have been? was that helplessness part of the nightmare? i had always been fortunate enough to wake up from mine.
i ended up sleeping in his hospital bed for a year before my mom pried me out of it to donate it. (who could need it more than a whiny teenage girl?) i had only ever dreamed sweetly in it. but it's been almost a decade since then (and even longer since the last time i slept between my parents after a nightmare). but i still wear his old pajamas to sleep, and i still clutch their hems, hoping to see him in some recurring dream again.
i wonder why i started pushing him away before he was gone. it’s small things like that that have been eating at me for years, but i’ll bear the guilt if it means i’m keeping more of him with me.↩
i’m running from something in almost all of my dreams. it’s how i’ve learned to recognize them, but i’ve never been able to take control or wake myself up. at most, i can make it easier to run. nothing else.↩
even now, it feels like i'm running for the both of us.↩