Dear Tony
I've been thinking a lot about the importance of the subconscious info retrieved by dreams in healing processes, not just at an emotional but physical level as well.
So to say that it's an entire spiritual journey that, at least in my experience, deals with the universal nature of aspects of life, being love the one that sums up any and all of our individual quests. Right now I'd like to tell you a pair of dreams I had while taking care of grandma, an Alzheimer's patient who ended up in an emergency room last week because a heart issue that had went undetected until now (I think we have a mind "connection" since we share a lot of time together).
I took on the responsibility of taking care of her a year and a half ago, when I came back home after finishing school. She was diagnosed with Alzheimer like a decade ago, but she has remained stable so it was all of a sudden that got this bad... It's a painful, hard to deal with condition, but I've learnt to share with joy and optimism the time in her company. So it was really disturbing the feeling of the abrupt disruption of her otherwise "good" health...
The dreams don't necessarily have a clear relation with what was happening with her as I watched over her at the hospital, but they came as a switching on after a dream I'd like to comment apart (I don't really know what "type" of dream is when it feels like being awake, and besides it was a sort of "vision" which I'm not sure to call a "premonition" but in some way foretold the hardships that would occur some days after). Well, the dreams I remember I had the couple of days we stayed at the hospital were these: The first day I was sitting there, as if it was a classroom, lights up, and here it comes a boy that presented his final work the same semester than me; it's like we are taking a class, there are a few persons, including a female professor there, but it's also as if we're in an intimate space, so as to approach each other without caring who could watch the way we interacted. I'm sitting at a desk and after what looks like a very flirty talk, he comes and begins to kiss the back of my neck. I feel good and nice, but don't feel really at ease because a hungry anticipation begins to build, I "imagine" how good it would feel if he kissed my mouth that way but there's something that seems not "right" in wanting that... I just keep the image of his smiling face while approaching me but it all ends there. Then I get into an exhibiton space where "my paintings" are in display. there also is a classmate with whom I worked years ago, who's there watching and bitterly criticizing my "way" of painting... Saying it's no painting at all. I get some steps behind him and almost yell strong arguments to defend my work; and again a female figure of authority stands near me, telling me to appease my speech, because the work can -and will- speak by itself. In this part of the dream there's no insecurity as in the beginning, but a contained anger, discomfort, maybe. It's weird how these two characters come to kind of interpellate first a private, then a public way to "show" myself. Finally, I'm in church. It's just the same room as before but with some furniture to look as a dinner party with eucharistic connotations. A square table dressed in white, and some served food. I'm arriving and there are some other people, among whom there is a young girl I know, dressed in white and acting as the one in charge. I feel strange because she's not as I know her, she has a smile that simply doesn't look sincere. I'm offered to take a drink, and here it comes the most curious part of the dream. First there's a glass of very red wine. Then, she opens a champagne bottle, that I can also have a drink of. Finally, here it is a glass of milk. It takes a lot of thinking to know which drink I'll chose to drink. I'd certainly like to drink that heavy wine, which I think is "in the middle" between the exaggeration of champagne (what are we celebrating?) and the childish option of milk. And even though I'd had preferred the wine, I end up thinking I'd rather take the milk -and some cereal-, just in case someone there would be to "judge" me as pretentious, vain or even drunkard if I chose the others. But there's no final choosing at all.
Then a few days after I dreamt I was in a large laundry room that was also a painting classroom. I got near a washing machine and there it was a paper that hapenned to be the one I asked to a professor with a concept about my work. The thing was the paper wasn't actually that but an apron, written, signed and decorated in the professor's fashion. And it also was the "letter" with the concept I had asked him to write. I take a look just to notice some green patterns and then I turn my head towards the entrance of the place, and he comes in, very serious. What is noteworthy of this dream is the relationship with the figure of my grandmother, that I didn't knew but read in one of your posts. It surprised me because I wasn't aware of the symbol (apron), but my mind used it nevertheless. I must note the work I asked my professor to comment on was referred to my relationship with her. And coming back to my original worry, now she's very affected, she hasn't been well since she got sick, and I feel really sad. I used to dream what would happen next day with her, and she frequently spoke to me about the dreams she had as if they were things that actually happened...
I must say that I miss her a lot, I mean, her singing, laughing, repeating on and on the same thing, even her "crazy" ways... Though her memory was "lost", she was a presence, a company, the body of constant affection and caring (a reciprocated one). Now it's her who seems lost. She was in some sort of way the objectivation, the protagonist of my returning home and the regaining of all my familiar memories and now it's like an ending to something that I think that had a lot yet to explore... then I beg God for peace, because I know her condition have meant a suffering since the beginning, after all. But there's something in me (maybe in her) that doesn't want to let go just yet. I just feel it's weird when you have to begin to miss someone when they're still there...