Last Night I Dreamt I Went to Manderley Again

There's a type of homesick maudlin romanticism that is built into my DNA.  It is most certainly not a character trait I would choose from a rational standpoint.  But there are some things you don't actually have control over, both strangely and unfortunately.

I dream most vividly when my sons are away.  I can sleep deeply because I do not have a constant vigil to keep. What, you ask, would I do in the case that some oogety boogety  (thanks Helena Bonham Carter's husband for that) man came to my door to snatch my children from me?  I have a plan or two up my sleeve, but I'm not foolish enough to let you (and possibly the boogie man) in on that one.  On Wednesdays I sleep the sleep of a woman who hasn't had a good night's sleep in ages, and doesn't have the weight of the world on her conscience.  And I dream .  Once in a very rare while I dream.  

Last night I dreamed of my mother.  I dreamed of her in vivid technicolor.  I dreamed of her in a way that she has not been remembered since her death in my own dreamscape.  I saw her face, and I heard her voice.  I saw her gray brown hair (not because it had grayed but because it was so far on the ash side of the color spectrum) coifed just the way she liked it in its barely medium bob cut.  I saw her somewhat rimless pink toned glasses.  I heard her inimitable voice.  She was arrayed in her olive and khaki shades with pleats in her pants and breasts in her shirt that I am to this day jealous I didn't inherit. Her voice rumbled out at me in a way that though my recollection of the specific discussion topic is much more dim, the sound and the quality of her voice is oh so clear in my memory of that dream.   

"Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.  It seemed to me I stood beside the iron gate a while, and I could not enter, for the way was barred to me."

I stood there listening to her, imparting wisdom into my own life's situation, and I could not enter in with her.  I asked her to interact with me, but she couldn't because she was no longer of this world even in the dream space we temporarily shared together.   I waited for her to solve the problem I was having, to reach the person I could not reach, and together we watched the third walk away.  Forever. The profundity of the loss of the other person as they walked away could have been lost on me if not for the unexpected and admittedly unrealistic presence of my quite real and alive mother in the reve scenario. 

I woke up and began my day in the usual way, except for the clawing of my mother's image in my brain.  Her overstated, nearly anachronistic, fur coat draped over her shoulder because it has just been THAT cold this week.  Her steel grey blue eyes barely squinting out over her slits for eyelids through her rose tinted glasses.  Her under made up face that had maintained a complexion and a suppleness any woman her age would have envied.  She slowed me, and called me and looked me straight in the eye and told me exactly what I needed to hear.  She had returned to my life with me and left an imagined dream comfort behind.  Hours later the face of her and the sound of her had completely faded, leaving me feeling the way I usually do about her fourteen years post death.  But while it lasted it was a good dream.