After dementia, a conversation begins

A few years ago, while clearing out my mother’s closets in anticipation of moving her to an Alzheimer’s unit in an assisted living facility, I found some of her diaries. Sitting amongst the pile of spiral notebooks, yellow legal pads, and hard-backed journals in which she’d written, I quickly noticed how often she recorded dreams, often more than one each day, in vivid detail.

I wondered how it was possible that in our countless hours of conversations, over meals and cups of herbal tea, while taking long walks through city parks and to museums, movies and more, she had never told me she was such a prolific dreamer? And how sad it was that now that I knew, it was too late for us to discuss this gift that we shared in common.

Then again, I never used to tell most people that I remember several dreams each morning. I just assumed that everybody did. But when I finally had the opportunity to delve into my lifelong fascination with dreams, I learned that although everybody dreams several times each night, most people remember only one or two a week. Clearly my mother and I were outliers in that regard.

As it happens, it was right around the time that I began to study dreams in earnest, that my mother began to slip into her own dream of dementia, which in her case included aphasia, a language disorder that stripped her of coherent speech. So we hadn’t had the chance to compare notes about our dream lives—until now, when it was too late.

I packed her diaries into a carton and marched downstairs to where she sat slumped on the sofa. I looked directly into her milky eyes and asked, “Mom, when were you going to tell me that you are a dreamer, too?”

She gave me a mute grin, which could have meant anything. She lived far beyond the bounds of language now. Nonetheless, I continued–picking up her hand, and softening my voice. “I understand that we can’t talk the way we used to, but you can come and visit in my dreams, and we can talk there,” I said.

Call it what you like: The Power of Suggestion. Wish Fulfillment. Coincidence. The fact is that from that day forward, and even now, years after her death, she has done just that.

Copyright 2018 Tzivia Gover

Read on to learn what happened when Mom began to visit in my dreams, and for more mother-daughter dreams and synchronicities:

Crazy Good: Dreaming of Mom

Rats from Heaven

Dreaming Toward Bliss