Sleep, Dream, Repeat

I am one of those people who always remembers their dreams.  This used to be so interesting when I was younger because every single night was like a new adventure in my head.  These days, not so much.  And, I shouldn't even complain because for a while, all I had were gut wrenching nightmares, which I rarely have anymore.  These days, I literally have the same three dreams over and over and over.  I know my brain is trying to work something out, but I have no idea what it is.  These are the basic frameworks of my three dreams:

1) I am married to someone who isn't Ted who I feel lukewarm about.  He is fine.  Nice person.  We don't have a lot of chemistry but we seem to have a nice enough family.  We like each other, even if we aren't really in love.  In the back of my mind, I have a faint memory of being married to someone else who is the yin to my yang - someone that I am ga ga about.  I wake up and see Ted sleeping next to me and breathe a sigh of relief.

2) I am in Costa Rica on vacation with friends with the intention of staying at my house.  When I get there, I realize that I never told anyone that I was coming and so my house is rented out and we end up staying down the road at some kind of a youth hostel.  The trip is fine but totally unfamiliar and strange.  We go do fun stuff but we hang out on a different beach, we go out to different places I have never been to and we don't see anyone I know.  It is fine, just not "my" Costa Rica.

3) I enter a vortex where time and space don't matter at all and the landscape is the combination of Costa Rica, my Jewish summer camp, and my kibbutz in Israel.  I am confused about who to look for first because they are all in a mish mash.  My room on the kibbutz is in the middle of the younger kids cabins at camp and all I really want to do is go swimming in the Costa Rica Ocean.  Nothing happens at all - I am just surrounded by familiar places but feel totally out of place in all of them.

What makes me crazy is that there is only ONE thing that I want to dream about - MAX - and I almost never do.  Once in a while, he is a background character.  Like, in the dream where I am married to some guy - Max is one of our children and the story of his life is definitely there.  But, I don't get to interact with him at all, other than to maybe know he is around.

After he died, I had many dreams about Max - but they were horrific.  I've written about some of them here- but not all.  Some were too awful to ever recount.

And, then - there was that one dream.  The dream that I beg to have again every night before I got to sleep. The one where he was mine again.  I could smell his sweet baby smell, I could kiss his chubby soft cheeks, I could hug him and feel him in my arms.  He was mine.  He was here.  He was alive.  And, it was SO SO real.  Instead, I am stuck with these same three other dreams night in and night out.

Sleep, Dream, Repeat.