On Not Remembering Dreams and the Turin Summer School

“To interpret implies placing a text within a relevant context, in order to give it a new meaning that goes beyond that which appears at first sight (Beuchot, 1997). But here [in the large group] we do not have a text to begin with, but only fragments of something that might become a text, so our work as interpreters also involves the very construction of a possible text to be interpreted. In this, interpretation and construction go hand in hand.” Tubert-Oklander & Hernandez-Tubert (The social unconscious and the large group: Part III Listening to the voices in the wind, Group Analysis Vol 47 (4) 2014)

At the summer school, in a group, I remember a dream.

I’m standing on the stairs, not wanting to carry on walking down.  My sister is lying on a bed in the room at the bottom of the stairs.  A kitchen.  I know she’s dying, and she’s in pain moving around.  There’s no-one with her.  In the dream I know if I go down and hold her hand it might make her feel better and ease the pain.  But that might mean it takes her longer to die.

I’m in a hospital room by my mother’s bedside.  She’s dying and I’m holding her hand.  She dies but she doesn’t know she’s died and opens her eyes and wakes up, sits up and puts her feet back on the floor and gets up.  I watch her.  The nurse says this sometimes happens, it doesn’t mean she’s alive, it’s just the muscles in the body still moving.  My mum looks at me and gestures questioningly, she wants to leave.  She talks but not in full sentences and not always in words that fit together.  She wants to come back with me and my daughter.  She says she can sleep in our room.  I don’t want her to come, but I don’t want to tell her she’s died.  She’s dead.  My daughter is there: I don’t want her to have to see this.  My mum follows us out of the hospital.

I carry on walking down the stairs after a long time standing there.  I seriously think about turning around and walking back up because seeing my sister in pain and knowing she’s going to die whatever I do is almost unbearable.

In the hospital in the early hours of the morning I go to get myself a coffee.  I look at the corridors and the stairs and the numbers by the lifts because I will need to remember how to get back here.  There is no-one else in the corridor. 

There is an older woman in the corridor carrying bags.

There is a man on the stairs who smiles at me and I think I must be wrong, it’s the afternoon and the bright light is the sun.

There is no-one on the stairs and for a moment I feel like I’m walking upside-down, walking up the stairs.

This is a different staircase, even though it looks the same.  Theres’s dawn light coming through the windows and the sky looks so clear.  Clouds hanging like they’re floating in water.

But this is the view from the aeroplane window and I’m flying away from all this and it’s not dawn, it’s evening.  The sun isn’t rising.  I can’t tell if these are mountains or just more clouds.  Until I see the mountains and of course they’re mountains, they look nothing like clouds.

In the car on the way back from the hospital I keep seeing foxes.  They run in front of the car across the empty deserted streets.  They all run from right to left and I think that must mean something.  One and then another and then another and another.  I think they’re all going somewhere, maybe to the same place.  It must mean something.

My sister’s husband is driving.  I don’t think he’s crying.  I don’t think either of us is crying.

When I arrive at the hospital he is waiting for me with my mum.  They waited for me while I caught a train that took all day.   They didn’t say why but they said I had to come today.  They wanted me to help because the doctors needed to know if we wanted them to change something.  Something that would mean she wouldn’t wake up, she still wouldn’t wake up.   They could keep doing something or they could stop doing something and the important thing was that we had to decide.  I had to help them all decide.  To do something or to stop doing something in one order or in another order.

My mum offers me a pill from a blister pack.

My sister’s husband offers me a valium.

I take them both.

There are also doughnuts if I want them.

We are sitting in a tiny triangular room with florescent light and no windows.  It is probably dark outside anyway.  And this is why it is so important to decide.

In the large group, the first day I am speaking and crying.

Maybe it is the second day and I am crying so much after speaking.  Maybe it is the second large group and I’m noticing my hands shaking.  I try to stop them and hold them still.  I try to move them intentionally or tap them.  Breathe in a moderate and non-panicky way.  Not too loudly.  Watching my hands with curiosity, feeling like I’m shaking them on purpose.  Someone hands me tissues and I can hold them in a hand.  My own hand.  I assume it is my own hand.  But I can’t make the fingers of my other hand move in the right way to take a tissue out of the pack.  It is interesting. 

After a while someone notices and says I’ll take a tissue out for you.

My sister’s husband asks what we are supposed to do now.  Driving around a roundabout before the sun is anywhere.  I say I have a feeling that if you love someone and they’ve changed you then somehow they’ll always be with you.  This feels theoretical, but at least it is something to say.  A fox runs in front of the car from right to left, and I don’t know if it means anything.

My mum keeps following me around, trying to talk, and not really very able to walk, and not knowing she is dead.  In the dream I think if I can get her back to the hospital she could lie down and go to sleep and maybe that would help, but she doesn’t want that.

I get lost in the corridors and the stairs.  The numbers by the lifts don’t seem to follow the same sequence.  Everything is somehow in black and white.

I walk down the stairs and hold my sister’s hand and she does calm down.  I sit with her while she dies.

I dream I wake up

I dream I wake up crying

I dream myself thinking: I can’t actually do it

I dream myself thinking: I can’t do it, but I really tried

I don’t remember my dreams.

It can be really hard to know when the moment of death happens, I notice myself thinking this.  There’s a long time when she might still be alive, might still be able to hear.  But I don’t know what else to say.