Are you tired? Because you've been running through my dreams

Or, why love lies in the nightmares

Photo by TopSphere Media on Unsplash

Content warning: it’s Valentines this week but I’m in a Halloween sort of mood so this newsletter does have some references to death and dying. If that’s not for you, that’s feel free to pass on this one x

Yesterday a friend I haven’t spoken to in a while contacted me out of the blue. She left me a voicenote and I listened to it expecting it to be one of the many cheery, “just thinking of you, we must catch up” notes that my friends and I repeatedly leave each other for years at a time before finally meeting up, having the best time, vowing we must get together more regularly and then repeating the process all over again.

However, this time the topic was different. She’d had a dream the night before, “and well, it wasn’t a good dream. So I’m checking in to make sure you’re alright.” Her tone said she wasn’t expecting good news, maybe even no news. No response to her message because I wasn’t there to give one.

On the face of it, it’s a bit of a bleak message to receive but it had an extraordinary impact on me. For a small moment my heart felt absolutely filled with love. How kind of someone to call and check on me, just because of a dream. They could have dismissed it or forgotten about it but instead they thought they’d get in touch and remind me of our friendship. It really made my day and I told her so, while also leaving the obligatory “we must find a time to catch up” message.

When you live alone it can be easy to view Bridget Jones’ premonition of dying alone and being eaten by Alsatians as less hyperbole and more as a realistic assessment of your future prospects, so being reminded that someone is thinking of you (and ready to alert the authorities if they don’t hear from you) is one of the most heart-warming things that can happen on a cold February day. Even if it is just to check that “the bad thing” that happened in their dream hasn’t actually occurred in real life.

I’ve had dreams like this before. Although if you’re turning up dead in my dreams you do really need to worry, I am currently two for two on them. When I was 14 I had a dream about a roadtrip and as a background point to the main dream my aunt, who at that point was alive and well, was dead. The next day my mother appeared at school to tell me she’d passed away that morning.

A few years later, the evening before my mother’s best friend died from cancer she appeared in my bedroom. In reality, she was in a hospice far away but somehow also there at the end of my bed firmly telling me to take care of my mother while I desperately repeated, “please go away, please let me wake up.” At her funeral I found out that she’d also “visited” a couple of other people that night. I suppose technically this is a ghost story but in my mind it’s a love story - there she was, holding back the light so that she could make sure her best friend was taken care of after she died. I think the same of my aunt, she could have just been there one day and gone the next but she popped into my dreams first to make sure I was prepared for it.

We talk of dreams as beautiful, mystical things, usually with a positive outcome. But much like in life, I think we don’t pay enough attention to the dreams which wake us with our hearts pounding, the ones that make us turn on the light and scour the corners of our room for monsters. Those are the dreams that show us what matters, what we fear to lose or long to have. Those are the dreams that move us to action, that make us pick up the phone, hunt down someone we’d forgotten. Call me dark but I’d always rather turn up in your nightmares, at least that way I know you’ll remember me.

I’m not suggesting we should all start scanning our dreams for warnings of death but I do think our brains have a lovely way of reminding us that we’re missing someone from our life or at least missing what they mean for us. I can’t tell you what my friend’s dream meant but I can tell you that we became friends at a point in both our lives when we were dreaming big, making crazy ideas happen and generally just living in a place of believing anything was possible. Maybe she needed reminding of that, maybe I did too. Or perhaps we both just needed to know we were still connected.

All of which is to say, in this week filled with hearts and flowers, know that true love lies in the dark parts of life. I’ve felt loved by friends during periods of celebration and joy but never as much as I have when they’ve sat on the sofa with me while I cried or turned up for another dinner with me even though they knew I’d be depressed and terrible company. I’ve fought for love by being fun and selfless but it’s never meant as much as when I’ve fought for it with a rage and desire that is purely selfish. I know what love looks like and it absolutely includes fighting off death so that you can haunt your best friend’s daughter and scare her into taking care of you. Anything less than that is just a daydream.

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