So I saw an old friend in my sleep this morning in between the snoozing alarms. I had this large liver. It was sometimes just large, like a bag of onions, and other times large like half a room like some sort of whale liver. I wanted to cook it, but it had stayed out of a fridge too long. I tried to bring it back by kneading it like clay and while a large part of it was OK, the top had become rubbery and could not be blended back in to the rest. When I spread it out, it looked like a pizza dough, with diced peppers and fried aubergine slices in it, all going wild.
And then she came into the next room, and she was naked. I was more shocked because she was naked than because she was alive. So young, unchanged and naked with her hair in a bun at the back. I wanted to embrace and kiss her, but held back - still not sure why, writing 90 minutes after. I had given up on shaping the liver-clay into a something. There was a muslin bag full of stuff half showing through, like papers and documents and maybe a wallet. I am not sure whose.
It was otherwise totally unremarkable in my mind that I was in a room with her naked, not a shock. Not sure why. It was only after I woke that it registered that she was dead and only as I wrote this that it registers that she has been dead more than 20 years. I woke up calm, happy, content, with a little worry about how to explain that my first reaction on seeing a naked dead friend in a dream was to embrace and kiss them. I now feel that she needed that hug less in the dream than twenty five years ago. I can no longer believe in an afterlife, so am I glad I brought her memory back? Perhaps not, but perhaps I was glad to see her there, confident, owning the moment.
I haven't recalled a dream for months, maybe years. I haven't recorded one for years, maybe ten, maybe more.