I've been having a recurring dream the past four years or so. I don't abscribe much meaning to the interpretation of dreams. I guess I see dreams as the conglomeration of a bunch of things that float around in your head. And so the individual parts might point to something that was happening or that you thought about, but the total dream may not necessarily mean anything.
Back to the recurring dream. It's not like watching the same movie every time, but more like watching a different episode of Matlock every time. The basic premise of these dreams is that my ex-boyfriend shows up and I have to break up with him. Or rather, he somehow doesn't know that we're not together anymore, and I have to explain it to him. Uh, listen, we've been broken up a while and actually, I've got this other guy over here. It's never really clear to me in the dream why he doesn't notice the giant four year gap in our relationship. That's not the point. The point is my anxiety at having to break up with this guy. Again.
Now, clearly there is still something unresolved in me about my old relationship. I'm pretty sure my ex-boyfriend knows that we're not together anymore. There's just something in the back of my head that feels sorta weird about the way it ended. While I felt our relationship had been disintegrating for a long time, the breakup blind-sided him. And I think I've felt guilty about that ever since, thus the dreams where I have to catch him unawares all over again.
One night recently, it was the same sort of setup again. A bunch of us, me and him and a bunch of vaguely familiar dream extras, were leaving Boone. It was sort of like the end of a coming of age movie, where everyone is scattering to their various new lives. We were were all leaving town, but we were also leaving some important stage in our lives and were hyper-aware of it. The whole scene reeked of significance. All it needed was that Green Day graduation song.
I had this awesome RV. It had the cab of a huge truck, and it opened up like a Transformer. I wasn't sure where I was going to go in this fantastic recreational vehicle. But I had the idea that my ex thought that he was coming with me, and I knew that I was going to have to tell him that he could not come with me in my super-cool RV. Josh was there, too, and he was nervous. He was afraid that I would be reunited with my ex and he would be left behind.
So I steeled my resolve and walked over to where my ex was securing items in the back of an overpacked red pickup. I started out with small talk, asking vaguely about "the future." He said something about going to Canada, all the while tightening bungee cords. He wasn't unfriendly, but he wasn't really concerned with me either. And I realized that he had no expectations of going anywhere with me in my RV, awesome as it was. He had his red pickup and his stuff and a map to Canada. He had his own thing, and he assumed that I had mine.
Relieved, I wished him luck and walked back to my vehicle. I pushed the button to open it, and there was a lot of whirring and whooshing as a set of stairs came down. Josh stood far away, watching me anxiously. I smiled and waved for him to come on.
The end.
And it's so silly that I should wake up the next morning feeling so relieved. There's no way that I could know that anything has changed with him. I haven't spoken to him at all. But now my subconscious is telling me that everything is okay, that we've all moved on and got our own lives and large live-in vehicles. How does my subconscious know? It doesn't, but I'm going to take its word for it anyway.
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