Last night was a night of troubled dreams for me. Most of it is vague and indistinct, but one dream stands out clearly. It was, sort of, a dream about Jen.
It’s not at all uncommon for Jen to make an appearance in my dreams, but only on occasion are my dreams really “about” her. Fairly often, she’ll show up sort of as part of the background of a dream that’s “about” something else entirely. Upon waking from these sorts of dreams and reflecting on them, I generally can’t say whether her presence in them represented us being “back together,” or if it was more a matter of the dream being “set” in the past, or what. The dreams usually don’t contain answers to these real-world questions. It’s as if what’s going on is simply that my subconscious has included Jen in the dream because, on some level, her being a fixture in my life is still a thing that my brain registers as the normal state of things. Even in dreams that are more directly about Jen, in fact, our “status” in the dream is not always clear; she might, for instance, be living with me, but the emotional reality of her having left me might also be present—or the exact nature of our relationship in the dream might just be undefined (or at any rate, impossible to make sense of from a waking perspective). These latter sorts of dreams are generally about anger or grief or anxiety. They were never super-frequent, and they’ve become (as one might expect) less frequent over time, too. But last night’s dream was closer to being of this variety than the kind where she’s just a background element, even though it was also very different from past dreams that have been “about” her.
In this dream, the two of us had just, for some reason, moved…and our new “home” seemed to be basically a hotel room. At least, that’s the best sense that I can make out of it; it was a single room (with maybe a separate bathroom), with a bed, a little table, a desk, etc., that was part of a larger, public building. Even in the dream, there was a sense of this being an unusual place to live permanently, but it seemed to make at least somewhat more sense than it does to my conscious brain. Anyway, we were just settling into this new “home,” and Jen seemed content with it, but I was profoundly unhappy. Jen was basically taking a “let go of feeling like we need a whole house and a bunch of stuff; we have everything we need here” type point of view. But I felt…cut adrift. Cut off from myself. Weirdly, there was a sense that we still did own our house (as in, the house that I still live in, alone, in real life), and that in theory, I could still go there if I wanted to—for instance, to maintain my garden. But it felt like, not living there anymore, I would (was already starting to) inevitably lose my connection to it. Like I would lose track of the house and the yard and everything that it meant to me about my life and my identity, and that stuff would all somehow “go on without me,” or maybe just decay from neglect, or something.
There was also very much the sense that I had not had a choice about any of this. The dream contained no concrete explanation for why we had moved out of the house and into this weird new residence, but it was for sure something that I had never wanted and felt powerless to change. To the extent that the dream consisted of anything as concrete as actual “events,” it was basically me trying to articulate, to Jen, why I was unhappy with the situation. It wasn’t an angry, frustrated, arguing sort of dream, but it did feel like the context was that Jen had made this decision about us changing our living arrangements, and I was struggling (unsuccessfully) both to reconcile myself to it and to express my dissatisfaction with it. But none of what I was trying to communicate was really registering with Jen, who in any case seemed no more than vaguely and politely interested in anything that I was saying.
Then something weird happened, with the room that was our home, shortly after we had turned off the light and gone to bed. Whatever it was doesn’t make enough sense to be described in words, and any attempt to do so would come across as zany and off the wall, which is not at all how it felt in the dream. It’s enough to say that a previously hidden feature of our new home manifested, and its impact on me emotionally was to further alienate me from this new reality. I wasn’t merely unhappy, didn’t merely miss our house; I couldn’t live here. The dream didn’t continue much beyond me feeling this and probably saying it to Jen, but I feel like there was at least a whiff of the notion that I was ready to move, alone, back to the house—which implied, of course, a reclaiming of the power to actually make my own decisions about my life.
I’m really not sure what might have triggered this dream last night in particular, but the symbolism in it is, I trust, not too hard to unravel. In the later years of our marriage, and even more so in the decision to end it, I felt powerless. Whatever Jen wanted, she would insist on, leaving no room for compromise or negotiation—and ultimately, of course, she chose to leave, rather than being willing to work together with me to fix whatever had gone wrong. For me, this was a crushing blow—one that upended my entire life. Being a part of that relationship was like a cornerstone upon which a big part of my identity had been built for over two decades, and that huge part of who I was felt taken away. And, of course, it felt like Jen herself just didn’t care. Plus, there came a point at which I had to make myself stop chasing our relationship, after Jen had checked out of it, rather than continuing to compromise and surrender my own wants and needs in the hope of holding on to her. And all of this is fairly transparently present in the dream.
It’s not surprising, either, that my brain should represent this all to me, in a dream, via my house, given how I clung to it and did everything that I could to keep it when Jen left—and given that I do have a lot invested in it, emotionally, and absolutely would feel cut adrift from who I am and who I want to be, if for some reason I were forced to let it go. What’s interesting, though, is how the change in living arrangements was the focus of this dream, while anything to do with Jen directly was relegated more to subtext. I mean, the dream was clearly more “about” Jen than the kind of dream I mentioned above, where she’s just present in the background—but I experienced it as being much more about losing my house (and maybe myself along with it) than about Jen or our marriage. And the bit at the end of the dream, that sort of pointed toward the notion of reclaiming agency and/or my identity and life? I want to resist getting too melodramatic or grandiose with my analysis here, because at no point do I feel like I actually “lost” my sense of identity (!)…and even though divorce was something that very much felt like it happened to me, I still made active choices throughout the time when it was happening (as well as since). Still, maybe—in a small way—the specific emphasis in this dream speaks to some kind of milestone in the never-finished process of “moving on.”