A Troubling Dream

I had a troubling dream last night.  Not a nightmare, or anything like that, but just one of those dreams which lingered after I awoke, making me feel uneasy.  A lot of what I remember of it - like all dreams, many of the finer details faded quickly upon awakening - was quite mundane.  It wasn't one of those dreams where I'm on the bridge of a ship, or travelling somewhere exotic or even facing some kind of peril.  Instead, I was working in an office, exactly what this office did, I couldn't tell you.  I don't think that even while I was dreaming it, the nature of the work involved was clear - it was just an office with old-fashioned desks and furniture, possibly on an upper floor.  Judging by the light levels and the way people were dressed, I'd guess that it was all happening during late Autumn, or early Winter, possibly in the run in to Christmas.  I was sharing the office with a female colleague, who was also  friend.  Now, at first, when I was trying to recall the details of the dream, I thought that this woman was an actual person I know, someone I used to work with and remain friends with, but, as is often the case with dreams, people never quite look as they should. let alone behave as they should and, after further thought, I rejected this identity for the apparently unnamed dream friend.

So far, so normal.  Just a regular dream.  But it started to get interesting when the working day ended in the dream office  - it seemed that it was closing down for a couple of weeks, (reinforcing my impression that it was approaching Christmas), and the prospect of not seeing my friend/colleague for that period distressed me.  As we prepared to leave and I tried to speak to her, it became apparent that she was depressed about something.  Out on the street, I offered my support and tried to intimate my feelings toward her, the response being that she had to collect her child from school, (this, at the time added to my impression that this was my actual, real-life, friend, who also has a young child).  Every response had to be dragged from her.  For some reason, at this point I realised that I didn't  know whether she was still with the child's father, or not.  I agreed to accompany her to the school, the route being, apparently, cross country, (startlingly, I recognised the path we were taking, not from real life, but from another dream).  Along the way, my friend/colleague began an embittered tirade about the state of her life, including how useless the child's father was,hjow horribly the child wa turning out (for which she blamed its teachers), culminating with the revelation that the father - whose name was Richard - was dying.  All of this, the subject matter and the revelations, but particularly the vehemence, left me stunned and confused, realising that she wasn't the person I'd thought her to be.  I found myself thinking that I'd wasted a large part of my life trying to pursue a relationship with her.

At which point, the whole dream unravelled, and I awoke, still feeling that sense of despair at having wasted my life chasing an illusion.  That someone I had cared about had turned out to be an embittered and apparently uncaring individual.  The latter part of the dream remained so clear that ended up sat on the edge of my bed for some time, contemplating whether it had some significance.  Had I, in reality, wasted years of my life on the unrequited passions for various women?  If nothing else, thinking about the dream in this way resulted in me rejecting the idea that the dream fried was in any representative of the real-life friend I had at first thought her to be - my actual friend has never, to my knowledge, expressed such bitterness.  Moreover, she would never speak of her child in the terms in which the dream friend spoke of hers.  As for the mysterious 'Richard', the dying father of the child (whose actual relationship to the dream friend remained unclear at the dream's end), I am t a loss as to where he came from: as far as I can recall, I've never had a female friend with a partner, past or present, called Richard.  Anyway, as I said at the outset, there was something about this dream that troubled me greatly.  Perhaps it was the doubts about my relationships in the real world that it raised in me.  Or maybe it was the way in which it confused me, temporarily, about a real life friend. Whatever it was, it has caused it to linger in my memory all day.  Hopefully, by writing about ut here, I can finally, so to speak, put this dream to bed.