Abandonment revelation (think I may have to repeat this one over and over again for a while 'til it sinks in): The reason I had nightmares for 10 years after my dad died, I think, is because I never really had him even when he was alive. So the ‘loss’ occurred long before he died, possibly when I was quite young. I remember having my first abandonment nightmare when I was about 6, the one about dad leaving me stuck on a crowded bus while he got off and the bus drove away with me still on it.
The abandonment dreams about my father during the ten or so years after he died were all extremely confusing – I never knew if he was alive or dead, or he’d keep showing up after I thought he was dead, or somehow I’d lost touch with him and wasn’t sure if he’d died while I wasn’t looking (which actually happened in real life – during the three months it took my father to die, a friend and I took a little two-day vacation to a friend of hers’ little seaside trailer along the Oregon coast. It was a nice, and much-needed, little break during that stressful time – but I remember waking up in a cold sweat from a nightmare that my dad had died while I was gone and I hadn’t gotten to say goodbye to him. That real-life nightmare remained, I think, tangled in my dreams/nightmares about my father for many years afterward. Guilt about having abandoned him – funny, never thought of that before? Might have more thoughts about that later.)
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