Not very interesting reading about other people dreams and this is kind of a sad post, but I want to get the dream down before I forget. Maybe there’s something to understand at some point. Terrible sleep for the last half of the night.
I woke up having a horrendous dream. I still feel nauseous still right now. I was a cop and had arrived to charge my dear old friend Barry for the murder of his wife. He was devastated, guilty and remorseful.
I was with 2 other cops and I had decided to say it out the charges myself to him even though it was the first time. When it came to the moment I started to feel emotional and upset. I was sitting on the sofa right next to Barry and it all seemed so wrong and unreal. And I noticed that I had the wrong charge sheet with me, it was some old traffic misdemeanour paperwork. So I built myself up to read out the murder charge only to discover the mistake.
My superior had a copy of the correct one and I indicated to her to read it instead of me. Just before she read it I noticed Barry’s teen daughter in the room singing about her mummy and wondering where she is.
I could see in the paperwork that there were photos of his half maybe fully naked murdered wife. I thought it best to let her know that she was about to hear very bad news, something terrible, and she could leave the room if she preferred. She did leave the room. She’d find out soon enough without having to see her dad charged. Just awful. Like I was really there. And utterly confusing as it is not consistent with what I knew of my friend, who I thought I knew very well.
I’m still in bed, have a sore head and feel shaken up by the Barry one. He was a close friend for a long time ago. Started off as my business mentor in 2007 and used to drive the many miles out to the country house I rented at the time. This was long before his Parkinson’s kicked in properly. We became close friends and many wonderful experiences and conversations we had over the years.
He had a taste for adventure too so we had little mini ones as his condition allowed. Like he’d never been on a horse before or seen Deep Purple live. We’d cross streams and get a bit lost in the woods and he’d get stuck with Parkinson’s and we would hang out and wait for the movement to come back.
I can’t really sum up one amazing miracle of a human here and do him any kind of remote justice to how great he was. All the good stuff, honest, kind, super intelligent, witty, generous ….long list of positive qualities. He witnessed a lot in my life, end of a marriage, a new intense love, the demise of that. And we remained good friends throughout, he’d come for the weekend quite often.
Then a spinal accident and paralysed neck down, into a home. I visited quite often. All the people forgotten by society with various severe conditions. All tremendously difficult…kind of get used to PD then that happens. WTF. Cope he did though. He could do next to nothing himself, and there was an air of defeat. There was a woman, his old carer that he had got married to in a rush just after the accident. All very odd. There were revelations I found difficult to hear about, sexual abuse from his mother as a child. That floored me, it was almost too much suffering to hear. I wasn’t a therapist at the time. But I did find him one to talk to about it. It explained a lot too, and not to be too simplistic about the complex repercussions of that type of abuse but there was a level of shame and self sabotage that had followed him I never understood.
Then he asked me to check his bank account on one visit and the wife had more than cleared him out of his hundreds of thousands. Overdrawn in fact. He didn’t really care about the money as he couldn’t do much with it now anyway. But the betrayal. Jeez. She then found out I’d helped him ‘out her’ and gave him an ultimatum, her or me had to go. He chose me, and so I haven’t seen him now for about 5 years. Can’t remember exactly how long. Don’t even know if he is still alive. Sometimes I think about just arriving but have to respect his wishes.
What I remember is someone who used the PD to its max for its opportunities for growth and expansion. That was the biggest act of courage I’ve ever seen I think. He even thanked it at one point for how it had transformed and opened his consciousness. I’m left with a lingering sadness. How can such a person have such awfulness happen to him.
Here’s his first horse experience and at Deep Purple with an orchestra playing with them, and we had seats very close to the front. It was marvellous.
Learning to Rest with it All 