Gone Isn’t Gone

Lucid Dream 14

This is a piece in a growing series of mine about dreams and lucid dreaming. In these stories, I give first-person accountings of some of the dreams that I have each night. Identities and locations can shift around with little to no warning and the narratives don’t follow typical plot structures. For more of these stories, click here.

I’m sitting in my bedroom with my good friend Isaiah when my old dog, Boo, ambles into the room. I realize suddenly that I’m dreaming.

“Did you know she died two years ago?” I ask him.

He looks at me a little confused as Boo greets him and brushes past his legs.

“Two years ago today was the last day I ever got to spend with her, and yet, here she is today — chipper as ever,” I say the words in airy disbelief.

I look toward Boo and see her brown eyes and wagging tail. Her hair is long, black and curly with tired wisps of gray. I understand that she’s a fixture of my dreams. She wanders happily in and out of these far corners of my mind as a gentle phantom. She makes her way around the room.

Isaiah still seems a little confused by what I’ve said. I know that I’m dreaming, but I still wonder whether he can see her too. She makes her way toward me. As I pet her she moans the way she always used to when she was still alive. She allows herself to descend gently to the floor as she points her chin up toward me. I scratch her as she continues to sink into the floor. Her collar jingles faintly.

I wonder, “If she can’t be seen, can she at least be heard?” I lightly shake her collar again with another scratch. It sounds more audibly this time, but as I look toward Isaiah again for confirmation, he still seems a little unsure how to respond.

“Can you hear this at all?” I ask as Boo reposes more and more comfortably in between my legs with another battery of tender moans. Isaiah tries to reassure me by telling me that he can see her, too, but his eyes are focused elsewhere. I can tell now that only I can see her and it hardly bothers me. I give up on trying to convince him; I know that this moment is real and his validation hardly matters. He’s only a figment of my imagination anyway.

I continue to pet her as she becomes one with the fuzzy blue carpet beneath her. She rolls daintily onto her back as she lifts a tentative paw into the air. It sways softly and automatically from side to side as I continue to pet her.

I know she died; I remember it happening. I remember how hard it was for our family. I remember how impossible it was for me to come to terms with the idea that that was the end — that we’d never see each other again, never go for another walk and never chase another rock. Chasing rocks in the stream was always her favorite activity in the world. It crushed my soul that I might never again watch her dash across a stoney shore, that look of sheer joy stretched wide across her face. The never-again-ness of it was just too much for me to bear.

But because of lucid dreaming I never fully had to bear it. It still sounds a little hokey to say, but she is a part of me. She wanders freely through the corridors of my imagination. She chases the ripples that scatter across the streams of my mind each time I think of her. And then when I dream, she’s there to greet me on those days where it feels like I need her the very most. It’s only right that she would make an appearance on this anniversary of our final day together. She looks at me with timeless eyes and we get lost in a bygone moment.

Each time I see her again, the world freezes around us. In these suspended points in time, I’m still given new opportunities to just be present with this loving creature of my memories. When Boo died, I tried my hardest to accept that all of these times were behind me. But the truth is that they’re not. I still get to see her and I still get to hold her. She still moans when I rub my fingers through her warm, black fur. Her stubby tail still wiggles back and forth erratically when she sees me. She still likes walks and she still loves rocks. We revel in these perfect little moments that float fixed outside of the walls of time itself. She’s gone… but she isn’t really gone.