Odd, isn't it, how dreams have elaborate backstories that need no rational explanation; they're easily understood since they are, after all, emanating from our own psyches.
The farmhouse in which I was raised was already a crumbling ruin by the time Mom sold it off, but in my dream it still stood, the rooms still decorated as they had always been, all my family's worldly possesions still contained within. But this dream took place in a world without Mom, as we, her children, sifted through the remnanats of our lives, searching for something, some kind of meaning...or something.
In my room, I found a journal Mom had kept based on a dare I had issued her, to watch a bunch of TV shows she would normally avoid and write about them. She filled the pages with acerbic comments on such forgotten late seventies arcana as W.E.B., Lifeline and The American Girls. There were her thoughts, her personality alive on the page, and it was as though she lived again.
Then I woke up.
Obviously, in real life, this journal never existed. But in that weird twilight between the dream state and the waking world, I half convinced myself it did exist, and had to be around somewhere. The details were too convincing: She'd written about shows that actually existed, and the authorial voice in the journals seemed so convincingly Mom's own. If only I could find it, and read it again, and remember another forgotten aspect of my mother, before another memory slipped away.
I got up out of bed, drank some milk, then laid back down. I wanted to go back to sleep, to somehow re-enter the same dream, but of course, that couldn't happen. So I thought about my dream. Remembering Mom, the house from my childhood, that all makes sense. But W.E.B, Lifeline, The American Girls? Series from the fall of 1978, none of which lasted a full season. Why the hell had my subconscious pulled those things out of the aether?
Might be best not to ask.
