please let me dream of you tonight

I should be doing one of three or four things right now: working on my paper, running, sleeping, or trying to find a place to live in new york this summer. i am in my running clothes, but its probably too late to go running, 11:30pm is pushing it, even for me. my paper is open on the computer, and i am on the seventh page, but the law review article i need can't be found on lexis, i have to wait until tomorrow to get the hard copy from the law library. no one returns my emails on criag's list and its probably still too soon to start booking appointments for the end of the week. i am too wide awake to sleep.

actually, i don't know why i did all that build up, i really want to talk about the dream i had last night about Brian -- its had me on pins and nettles all day. i haven't been able to get anything done, which stresses me out and keeps my focus on it. okay, so here is what happened, to the best of my memory. brian didn't die, but he was gone for about 8 months. i knew he didn't die, i had known it for a long time. we were in charlottesville and some how there was kayaking involved, but kayaking along something that seemed like a really long water slide (much like a similar dream i had about brian, where i was on a really long water slide -- we are talking at least a 45 minute ride here -- but there were too many people on it and they were slowing it down, and i really wanted to get down the slide because i knew brian was waiting for me at the bottom. i think in that dream, i finally got down the slide and to brian, but i am not sure). but anyway, brain was alive, and in the dream, i had learned at an earlier point that he was alive but lost for several months. we were in charlottesville and together, but only kind of. he was giving me all kinds of mixed signals, sometimes holding my hand, sometimes telling me about the girl he was seeing before he went away. not rebecca, but some other girl, an heiress of some kind, who was now in a bad situation. i wanted to hold him but at the same time tell him he could go to her if he felt he owed her an explanation. which seemed to be his reason for telling me about her. he didn't seem to want to be with her, but he felt he had left her and something bad had happened to her, so he felt bad. but he was also very happy go lucky and really wanted to do everything and spend time with everyone. sometimes he would make me feel like i was cramping his style, other times he would grab my hand and hold on, or grab me in a hug so he could relieve his emotions. i didn't want to let him out of my sight, and my actions toward him were almost maternal. not in an oedipal way, but i wanted to make sure that he was taken care of. i was trying to figure out what he wanted, did he want to be with me or did he want to be free of me so he could enjoy being alive and take advantage of the freedom of being alive. right at the end of the dream, right before i woke up, and when i knew i was coming out of the dream, i said something to the effect that if you want to be free of me, you are going to have to be explicit about it. to which he replied, okay, thats what i am doing now. then he walked away. it was very important that i not cry at this point, which i didn't, but i walked away and went back to my kayak and got back on the rapid/water slide and continued down.

so i am freaking out because brian rejected me in my dream. i can't just shrug it off as a dream because i think (1) my dreams help me clarify what i am thinking and (2) since brian died, my dreams are the only interactions i still get with them, and i rely on my dreams to be able to spend time with him and suspend the reality that he is gone forever. plus, in my dreams, he is so real, his personality is just as i remembered, and the dream brian always acts consistent with the real brian, so even if it is my subconscious just making up what i need, it does a damn good job of reflecting his personality in a way that brain can't do when i am awake and trying to pull up a clear picture in my head. when i am awake, i can bring up the movie of his past actions, but i can't take brian out of that context and have him act independently. i rely on my dreams to take brian out of the restrictions of my memories and to give him an independence and reality that allows me to forget that he is dead.

i know i have been lucky to have some amazing dreams with him, where we could just be together or hang out, when it felt that he was telling me something. like that amazing dream this past summer when i was in new york where it was as if he realized that i wasn't ready to say goodbye, so in my dream i was given 24 hours to spend with him. all we did was hang out and do normal things, like go to the doctor and sleep. whenever i started crying because he was dead, he would stop me and say, don't cry, we are together right now, lets make the most of it. if that dream had a message, it was I love you. This was real. You will always carry with you these feelings of peace from when we are together. it also gave me a chance to say goodbye.

Him sending me a message seems to be the theme of most of my dreams with him. Like the ones that i had right after he died, when he was there, shirtless, and god knows why he was shirtless, but it would have been totally typical of brian to walk around shirtless as if it were the most normal thing in the world. i was so exicted in my dream because he was alive and i thought he was going to be okay. but he said, no sarah, the doctor's told me i am going to die. its my pulmonary artery. to which i responded, but you are alive now, maybe that means that you are going to be okay. no sarah, he kept repeating, very gently, i am going to die. but i couldn't give up on my hope that because he was alive, he was going to stay that way. the message of that dream was clearly: brian is dead. you have to realize the reality of the situation.

what, then, is the message of this dream? that i can't romanticize what we had. well, no shit. i know everything wasn't sunshine lollipops and rainbows. i don't need a dream to remind me of that. i know he could be thoughtlessly inconsiderate of my feelings, but i also know i doubted and continue to doubt his feelings for me. and now, if i could ask him one more question, it would be what he felt towards me. if this dream gave me the chance to ask that one last questions, then the answer was clear: brian, i really love you and want to be with you, do you want to be with me? no, and i am really sorry, but i want to live and i can't do that and be with you. i probably do love you, but i want to be free because you smother me. the answer that i feared the most. maybe it is just my subconscious giving voice to my deepest fear. but if that is the case, why did it have to do it so convincingly? Why did i have to hear brian, dead, and therefore in a final form that can't be changed as he experiences more, tell me that i had to stop trying to keep him all to myself, as i was in the dream, and why did he have to tell me that he wasn't mine anymore? if i can't even have him in my dreams, then i have nothing of him left.

maybe its my subconscious telling me that i am using brian in my dreams as a crutch and i have to stop. but i don't want to. i don't want to go thru the rest never feeling again the way i felt when i was with him. why can't i have that in my dreams, i sure as hell don't have those feelings in reality. why can't i have my dreams, i have enough reality to deal with when i am awake. i wonder if someone will read this and think that i have an unhealthy attachment to brian, one that predated his death. i wonder if they think i am a needy person and it is better that we broke up and that if they were him, they would want their freedom too. to those people, i don't know what i would say. i guess i would try to convince them that i am not as needy and clingy as i sound but that i always worried that i was and analyzed my actions within that context. if i was afraid that brian was in a relationship with me that he didn't really want, i worried that by staying in the relationship with him i was becoming too dependent on him. but we did love each other. i don't know if i can explain the feelings of peace i felt when i was with him, the contentment. i might already have said this, but i used to always fall asleep on his bed when we were studying at night. i would get so relaxed that i would fall asleep. from someone who is a habitual insomniac, that is quite a feat. so maybe i craved that feeling of contentment. even when we were broken up, i knew i could call him, anticipating hearing his voice, the voice that i know he reserved for me, he always answered the phone the same when he knew i was calling, it was always, "hey" or "hey you" drawing out the word, as if there was nothing else that he would rather be doing than answering my call. I still need that. the knowing that i was loved, the knowing that we were happy.

none of this makes any sense. there is definitely no thesis or topic sentence, and it is probably completely lacking in clarity. maybe the point is that i need to believe that he loved me and my dream last night robbed me of that security, which, now that brian i dead and i can't call him up and hear him answer the phone or get a hug in which i feel enveloped and surrounded by his love, is all i have. the dreams of him are all i have left to keep reminding me that he loved me, and now that too was taken away. god baby. do you see what you have done to me. i need you, i need you with me in some way. im not ready to say goodbye. please. please stay with me. i can't survive without you.