Joan, I understand those dreams. I have them all the time--my husband and I doing things like we used to. For some reason this morning his FTD kind of hit me again. I had gotten up and my husband asked to do something. I told him okay and then he started to apologize over and over again "I'm sorry, I'm sorry"--I don't know why. I hugged him,and told him he didn't have anything to apologize for. I walked into another room and thought "I want my husband back" and started to cry. I haven't cried about his FTD is a long while...sometimes our nighttime dreams are all we have.
My dream is recurring, upsetting, and has been going on since roughly 2004, when all this started. Just as I'm drifting off, I think someone is taking my wedding and engagement rings. I don't know who the "someone" is, or why they're in the house, but their goal is to take the rings right off my hand. Sometimes this caused me to wake up, take off my rings, and keep them in the jewelry box on my dresser overnight. This winter I just took them off, and keep them there. It's easier to smear on hand lotion several times a day anyway, without a diamond. It's an obvious metaphor for my marriage being taken by the disease.
Joan, our dreams are very similar. Many years ago (15 or so) Charlie and I used to walk every evening after supper. A few houses down from ours an older couple sat on their porch. Every evening they sat there from early spring to late fall. We always stopped to say hello and visit with them for a few minutes. After we walked on Charlie always commented on how they sat there night after night. He always wondered if they didn't get tired. I always told him that maybe that would be how we would be when we were their age. I dreamed that we would grow old together, content to sit on the porch and watch the world go by. And oh, how I wish we had had that opportunity.
I hear you, Joan. Dreams are good! My wife just entered a year-long Phase III clinical trial this week and whereas we both obviously hope first that she is in one of the groups actually receiving the new med and not a placebo ... and second, that the new med actually does have a positive effect ... realistically we know what our future will be regardless of the clincial trial. So ... dreaming is good!!
Yep, Joan. Life has changed forever. I, too have dreams....the kind I wake up to while I'm still in that "fog". I really imagine sounds of other human life in my house. I wonder where my youngest daughter is.....I imagine her still about eleven years old. I think I'd better get up and make John's breakfast, see what Ari is up to....I don't feel lonely for a moment. Then, I realize that it was just part of a dream I was having and I am indeed all alone. This happens frequently. Wierd, huh? I read your blog about the chain mail you recieved....about describing your life in one word. I, too, have thought of that. I just wonder what to call myself. You said "Limbo". I have invented a word to describe myself....I am a "Limbite". Not single, not married, not divorced or widowed, unavailable. Remaking myself, slowly, but lonely. In limbo.
Oh Joan, I hear you! One year since DH's dx and I still wake up and am confused. As the fog clears and I realize that I was dreaming and that he's not hear, and we will not have the future we "dreamed and planned" I feel as though I have been punched in the stomach. I'm still waiting for the day I wake up and have accepted reality.
Joan's Library has a link - http://astore.amazon.com/wwwthealzheim-20/detail/156474454X- to Anne Davidson's wonderful book entitled "A Curious Kind Of Widow". That's what all of us are.. and it's a wonderful book. If you get it you won't be able to put it down until you finish it.
I've had dreams of DH and I doing things together in our currenmt time, but he's okay. They are wishful dreaming and I don't dwell on them. I dismiss them as wishful dreaming, a waste of time.
The dreams that mean the most to me have been the ones I occasionally have, in which I am doing vwry ordinary things with full exuberance and joy. Running through a wildflower meadow on a beautiful day--like the classic comercials-- or skiing, slaloming, and later relaxing by a fireplace in the lodge. Ridinbg a motorcycle, running on a beach. These dreams come in full color, full sound, full senses. And the I would wake up. Early on, awakening was hurtful, filling me with self-pity, because they were gone and reality was not them. After some years, a friend took me on a motorcycle ride and I felt the air rush past me like it would if I skiied. We camped and picnicked in flower meadows, went to a ski resort--I watched the skiiers from the lodge, by the fireplace. What I came to realize was that the reality of my life, with CMT and all the limitations it's brought, has never and will never diminish the core of who I am and what I can feel, see, do. What you see is only part of who I am. Inside, I am whole. The dreams are my windows to the rest of me.
Carosi, your dreams sound wonderful indeed. Made me think of the movie Atavar which I saw yesterday in 3-D. A marine who has lost the use of his legs is given a new body to inhabit on a foreign planet. A beautiful film. I have been seeing scenes from it in my mind all day long today.