Pandemic Dreams

 I haven't been inside my Eagle Street home since the house was sold in 1987.  But the memories of that place and the ghosts that still live within its walls continue to call out to me.  For nearly 25 years, I would have occasional dreams about the house. Those dreams always involved a large cat.  Sometimes it was a Lion, sometimes a Tiger or Bobcat but mostly it was a Mountain Lion. In every dream,  I would walk into the house to visit Mom, but instead find myself being chased down the hallway, through the den, and out to the pool deck, where the wild cat would lunge at me, grabbing my neck in its jaws.  I would always awaken as it sunk its fangs in and started to shake me.  Mom was never in those dreams. It was always just the wild beast that always caught up with me and killed me.  A few years went by before I realized that I hadn't had an Eagle Street nightmare in a long while. The Covid era seemed to affect dreams, and I had an interesting Eagle Street dream during the pandemic.  This one, thankfully did not include a killer cat:

I am at the Eagle St house.  I don't live there, but it must still be in the family because I go up to the front porch and go inside. Mom may or may not live there anymore but she is still around.  I know she will be coming over to the house too. Now suddenly she is in the living room with me.  She is in the shape she was in during her romance with Paris Young in 1975. She is a youthful middle-aged woman with long curly golden-colored hair and a curvy cute figure. She is energetic and agile. Her back is no longer damaged. She can walk normally.  She is not deathly pale and wheezing from congestive heart failure. She is not old, sick and dying. 

She has a life of her own now and does not need my undivided attention.  I feel that she is leaving soon and I want her to know that even after everything we experienced and endured with each other, I still love her.

She gets up to leave, as she is scheduled to go meet up with someone. I give her a big hug. During the hug, I was silently sending her four thoughts. The feelings I was conveying to her were love, regret for our past problems, hope that she feels the same, and especially,  hope that today is the beginning of a new, healthy and happy relationship.  

These hopes were successfully conveyed to her. I did not, however receive reciprocating feelings back from her.  Although I could feel fondness coming from her, there was also a distracted feeling. She was done here, and was ready to move on with a new life.  Clearly, she no longer had a desperate attachment that required her to control me and make me feel guilty all the time.  She was free of the need to suffocate her loved ones.  I was happy to feel that, but at the same time I wished that she had the same regret that I felt for our wasted, troubled years, but she didn't.

The embrace ended, and she hurried out the front door to her life that did not include her children.  I turned back into the house, feeling a bit sad because it seemed our relationship was still unresolved.  

I walk into the kitchen where I found a skillet with hash browns on the stove, frying unattended.  My younger sister walked in, saw me, and said, " Yeah, Mom still walks away from what she started and doesn't worry about seeing it through."

This dream, which occurred November 21, 2021, seemed sad in some respects, but it also gave me a great deal of closure.  The Catholic part of me interpreted it as Mom's time in Purgatory coming to grips with her Earthly issues had reached its completion. Any regrets and penitence were between her and God, not me.  She must have served her penance and vowed to not continue her manipulative controlling behaviors, and could now live in a different way. A freer way. 

Interpreting the dream in this way has given me freedom as well.  Did Mom come to me in a dream to tell me that the demons in her that caused her to hurt so many people in her life had been rendered impotent?  That her spirit was cleansed, and that I can now be free of the residue of her destructive entanglements? I am going to go with that interpretation.

The Purgatory concept is strong in a second Pandemic dream that I had several months before the dream of Mom.  This dream did not include Eagle Street, but it included brother Skippy.  I wrote about Skippy in my July 20, 2018 post.  Skippy was a drug addict and a career criminal. Any goodness and love he may have had as a small child was completely replaced with lawlessness, evil, and addiction in the early 60's. He died of a heroin overdose in 1986, and I was not sad to learn of his passing.  I never dreamed of him when he was living, or after he died.  He just did not matter to me at all.  So when I woke up from this dream, I was quite surprised:

In the living room of my house, there is a mail slot in the wall near my desk.  I keep a wicker basket on the desk to catch the mail as the letter carrier pushes it through the slot.  I am sitting on the couch, when I hear the sound of the mail slot opening.  Thinking that the letter carrier has brought the mail, I look up to see what is going to fall into the basket.  There are no mail pieces.  Instead, a flat Stanley version of Skippy slides through the mail slot head first, floats over the mail basket and rights himself in front of me.  He is now a standing up, regular human form Skippy, not a cardboard cutout Skippy.

He is clean, with tidy hair and clothing.  He no longer stinks of Camel cigarettes, Thunderbird wine, injection site abscesses and rotten teeth. His tattoos are gone, his eyes are sparkling, and I realize that the last time he looked like that was in 1965. 

He smiled and excitedly said to me, "I got out!" And just as soon as he said that, he morphed back into Flat Skippy, and was quickly sucked out of the mail slot and disappeared. 

I vividly remember these odd dreams because of the strong negative impact these two people made on the family and community.  Both Mom and Skippy took advantage of kind people and stole at every opportunity from strangers and loved ones alike, with no remorse. Both worked together to commit their crimes. Both caused so much damage and disruption over so many decades. Neither one could ever be trusted. And both died within four months of each other in 1986.  When I had the Flat Skippy dream, I woke up and immediately said, " Wow, Skippy just got out of Purgatory!" Then a few months later, I had the Mom dream, woke up and immediately thought the same thing.  Seems like they served about the same length of sentence. And now their souls are both out there somewhere, experiencing the next chapter. They were a powerful wrecking crew here on Earth. I hope that wherever they are now, they using their powers for good instead.