I had a dream with Josephine in it this morning. I thought I was over her, but issues still linger. It doesn’t help that it touched on abandonment issues that I still have. It happened at a time that I normally would have been in a deeper sleep and wouldn’t have remembered it, but there was noise that brought me into a shallower sleep.
The dream was that I was in bed, on my loft, and I looked across the room at a calendar on the wall, where there isn’t one in reality, and noticed a post-it on a certain date, a post-it that I didn’t put up. Intuiting that it had something to do with Josephine, who was still in the country and staying in the house that I was in until she left, which changed from this apartment to a house, possibly my parent’s house, I jumped out of the loft taking blankets down with me and read the note. The note was from Josephine, it was a tender note saying that she was leaving on that date, the position of the post-it was probably August 31. The tenderness was in a quote from a musical that only existed in the dream and referred to an inside joke between us that also existed only in the dream, something about being a star. At that point I panicked and ran around the house looking for her, going to the rooms where I expected her to be sleeping. One was a couch and the sheet on the couch was undisturbed and neatly tucked in. I was trying to scream, “No!”, but my throat was thick and I could only manage a scratchy tone. The feeling of a loved one being gone was too much to bear.
All day today I was thinking of the tender moments between Josephine and me, the fun times, the way she laughed and was so full of life, and it hurt to try to reconcile that with the selfishness I sense from her now.
My recent thoughts on having abandonment issues, along with this dream, reminded me that the earliest dream I can remember was an abandonment dream. I’m not exactly sure when I had the dream, it was probably in the old house in Englewood Cliffs, and I’m not sure how old I was, but my arbitrary guess would be between seven and nine years old.
I mostly just remember the feeling of being abandoned. There are two actual images I remember. One is a God’s Eye view of a boat like a yacht sailing on the Hudson River on a sunny day and the feeling that I wasn’t on it and was supposed to be. The other image is me on the banks of the Hudson River, one foot upon a rock looking out over the water. The view is from the ground up at me, the George Washington Bridge may have been in the image. The feeling was that I was alone and that I had been left behind.
And this all led me to a real memory that may have contributed to these abandonment issues. I think my age was in the same range as the dream. Parents were visiting someone on Virginia Ct. in Englewood Cliffs, a few doors down from a classmate of mine. I was playing in the backyard, probably with Tom and Bob, and they all got in the car and started to leave without me. I think I remember running after the car for I don’t know how far until they noticed I wasn’t in the car. It may not have been too far, several houses. I was crying but they were all laughing about it. I don’t know if the memory is real, though.
