Reoccurring dream.

[fluffy2buffy]

Morning

To cut short a long story, my dad had vascular dementia and eventually was admitted to hospital with pneumonia and sepsis (from his care home) where he died after following the Liverpool pathway. So you now know the background.

My dreams have been for the last couple of years that my dad was poorly but he went onto make a complete and full recovery and is now a normal person with a life etc. I keep joining the dream at different points in his life going forward like a tv series almost but with less dramatics lol. It's real when I'm dreaming and I remember all the incredible details. When I wake up it takes me a while to remember he's dead. Last nights episode was we were at a house that I didn't know visiting friends of his but we were in another room because they were discussing with carers about putting more permanent care in place for a member of the household. Very mundane. But I was getting frustrated with him because I was talking about my real life experiences of him being ill and he was getting very frustrated with me as he doesn't remember any of it.

Sorry it's long!

I have similar about my grandmother. She too had vascular dementia and in all dreams I just feel very frustrated and angry towards her.

Does the story move on? It's almost like 2 time lines. It's the weirdest thing but not scary.

So in your dream your dad is living his life as though nothing has ever happened - carrying none of the emotional burden - and you are watching from a completely different ‘place’ feeling confused and frustrated, knowing the reality whilst he thinks everything is fine.

I can imagine that this may have sometimes been how it felt whilst he was aliven- watching his ‘story’ unfold from the sidelines. Unfortunately those with dementia don’t often have overarching understanding of the whole situation. So this could be your mind trying to make sense of that over and over again. It must have been a very sad and challenging time for you and your family, and your poor dad wasn’t ‘there’ like you were - he was living on his own, difficult pathway, and being cut off from him like that must have been so upsetting.

I don't know if it does. It's often as if nothing has happened, but sometimes it seems to be in the past? It's very odd.

In the dream my dad had dementia but he recovered from it and completely got his life back to normal. So in one of the dreams I had to explain to him why I'd sold the house and why he no longer had the car. It's so real that this morning I woke up thinking of reasons why he'd recovered (like it was just a bad reaction to a water infection for eg) and then I remembered it's not real. Totally bizarre.

It was absolutely awful his illness and unfortunately no family apart form me. I went for a weeks holiday to see him and never went back home again (house sold, job left, friends etc). It's fascinating and I'm sure it's my brain working through it all. I was very very depressed for a number of years when he died but the last year I've started to think in a kind way that I've done enough grieving now, I'm almost sick of thinking talking about it.

Wow, that’s an awful lot of loss and upheaval for you in your own life quite aside from having to process what was going on for your dad and having to deal with the practicalities. And so sudden too, and having to do it alone. No wonder you were depressed for a long time.

It strikes me that when someone has dementia and we have to take over their affairs, it is a very unnatural thing to be doing to a grown adult. Perhaps the shock of having to do that and the associated feelings is what is being played out here. Despite there being a rational explanation for why you had to do that, maybe some irrational part of you feels guilty or that you ‘shouldn’t’ have been doing that - the emotional side of you couldn’t catch up with the rational reality at the time because it was simply too enormous and shocking.

Whatever these dreams are doing, I strongly believe it is all part of a process, and if it feels too much to do it consciously in waking hrs, then the mind takes over at night. Good luck OP, 💐