the solipsist in love

Dreams of love and loss

Do you ever have dreams of an ex that leave you feeling destroyed in the morning? That’s me today. It wasn’t an especially bad dream, plot-wise, but it’s always the emotional charge of it that lingers. So last night it was him walking away with his girlfriend (my ex-girlfriend, technically), walking away again and again, always smiling, without a scrap of concern for what he was leaving behind.

I’m calling this day a wash; I don’t expect to get anything done.

Feeling all of these horrible emotions churning inside me, fresher and more concrete than I’ve ever experienced them, I’m astounded that I spent two months of my life forcing myself to continue feeling this way: unappreciated, neglected, expendable, valueless, not enough. I excused it because I thought it would “build character,” and held out because I thought things might change if I waited long enough. How fucking stupid was I? And the thing is that this is not an anomaly in my life: it’s just an exaggerated version of the pattern I’ve run through with pretty much every guy I’ve ever loved, or wanted to love.

I should be grateful for having had this destructive pattern shoved in my face so that I can never repeat it again without remembering vividly how much it hurt, how much I didn’t deserve to feel this way. But I’m not at the point yet where I can feel grateful, or anything, really, except confused, wounded, and violently angry.

Yesterday it was a different dream, a different ex (call him Travis): I dreamt that after half a year of silence I flew across the country to his parents’ house on a whim, knowing that on this day of the week he would be there for dinner. Pristine snow blanketed the lawns and shrubbery in his neighborhood, creating that magical stillness of the east coast winter. I arrived at his front door and the house was empty, so I got out my cell phone to call him when he walked up. It was an awkward meeting. He seemed like maybe he was happy to see me, or just surprised. He kept saying, “You didn’t call me to let me know… you should have called me.” I had dinner with his parents. I saw his old bedroom for the first time. I knew from his Livejournal that he was dating his ex (the one before me) again, that he was most likely madly in love with her again. But still I hoped for something, a reconnection, a return to the intimacy we had created between us once upon a time.

When I woke up I felt a warm stirring inside me, the abrupt reappearance of the fondness I had felt for him when we were together. So my yesterday was flooded with fuzzy memories and a longing to reconnect, as we had (almost?) in the dream. I fought hard against the urge to IM or email him; I ended things clumsily back in March, and we haven’t spoken since. Would he resent me for contacting him? Does he hate me now? Is it even possible, or practically desirable, to try to recreate what we had? I don’t know the answers to these questions. I would like to know that he thinks fondly of me, but I’m not sure it’s worth the asking, the risk of finding out the opposite.

Do other people have such strong reactions to their dreams? Do they ever haunt your days, the ones that stick despite your best efforts to release them to their natural dissolution? Are there dreams that you cling to like a warm blanket, letting their good feelings envelop you until finally they fade?