I’ve had a weird and entirely discomforting thing happen a few times over the last couple months. While having fairly normal dreams (and the word “normal” is doing a lot of work here because I tend to either not remember my dreams, feel them so strongly that the emotions from them color my entire day, or have horrible nightmares), a cast of charactes from a past dream have invaded and changed the very nature of the dream they arrive in. You see, a few months back, in late April, I had a dream about defeating a horrible warlock. It was a pretty typical fantasy story dream, with a cast of adventurers on my team as we did stuff I don’t remember that eventually culminated in taking down an evil spellcaster who was trying to perform some kind of ritual that would give him some kind of ascendant power (I’m pretty sure it was immortality). This warlock had a crew of misfit-type underlings that we were mostly able to bypass as we went in for the kill. As I struck the head from this vile sorcerer, the mooks we’d bypassed swore undying revenge on me, specifically, but I woke up pretty much right after that so I didn’t think much of it.

The first two times they showed up again, this same band of underlings, I also didn’t think much of it. I honestly don’t remember much of the first event, beyond their arrival and immediate irrelevance. The second time they showed up in a different dream, they briefly took center stage but were stuck in the general tenor of the dream I was having, which mean I was able to sidetrack them by making it seem like someone else was the person they wanted and, like hapless villains in most children’s cartoons and TV shows, they fell for it and ran off. Eventually, they realized their mistake, but they did no harm since before they could do more than realize I’d fooled them, I woke up. The most recent time, the whole nature of my dream was warped by them, even before they showed up. I was having a Scooby-Doo-esque dream, involving myself and a group of largely faceless characters traveling around the US, investigating largely harmless mysteries. The tone of that changed with the last mystery we tried to solve. Suddenly, instead of people in masks and zany hijinks, we were going undercover in some weird sex cult. It took all of us putting ourselves in incredily vulnerable positions in order to be in the correct position to foil their plans for some kind of strange sex-fueled ritual (by way of context, I don’t typically dream of much related to sex but I’ve been reading a lot of Dresden Files lately and there’s a lot of villaneous, cultist, sex-adjancent magic rituals in many of those books), but we were just about to bust things wide open when I (and my dream) got derailed.

Somehow, when a brief period of being awake to get a drink and fix my curtains failed to shake me from this odd dream, I discovered I’d been left out of the final car to depart for the ritual site (as if the dream carried on while I was gone, but my character in it had temporarily vanished from the world). As I attempted to get back into the mystery-solving portion of the dream, the slowly worsening atmosphere suddenly spiked and there I was, surrounded by the once-hapless mooks of that warlock I killed. This time, they held the severed head of the person I’d distracted them with in my last dream and the leader of the mooks, a sorcerer wanna-be with an enthusiastic love of knives, told me I wasn’t going to escape them this time. It was alarming, to say the least, and even still caught in the throes of my dream I knew something was wrong. They shouldn’t have been there. They were the wrong tone, even for the strangely worsening tenor of my mystery dream. They also shouldn’t have been able to just appear like that. It was incredibly stressful, to suddenly be confronted with a group of people who explicitly wanted to cut off my head and then started preparing to do that as I attempted to use the various powers and abilities from the dream in which I’d killed their original boss and couldn’t. They’d come with all their powers and fantastical gear, but I was just some mundane, mystery-solving person who was falling further and further behind my friends who were going to be trapped in some dark ritual if I wasn’t there to signal to the cops or whatever.

They were about to cut my head off on top of the horrible altar they built out of the bones and bodies they’d brought with them and a brick wall they destroyed in front of me, to revive their dark master, when I was yanked from my sleep by the horrible metal-on-metal screeching of my oscillating fan. It was horrifying to go from seeing the blade swinging down towards me to hearing a noise that I assume is what it would have sounded like for that heavy-bladed sword to have struck the altar beneath my neck. It was also horrifying to suddenly see the pattern in my dreams, of things slowly getting worse in this latest dream and the rising power of these same six characters (who all have distinctive forms, costumes, or mannerisms that are still as clear as day in my mind, despite the time that has passed and how much I’d like to forget them) who seemed to be able to follow me from dream to dream. I’m not really the superstitious sort, but I am open to the idea that there’s more going on in the universe than we currently understand. Which, in this case, means I am willing to acknowledge the possibility of things like ghosts or dream-hopping baby nightmares who are slowly gaining strength as they survive each dream encounter with me. I mean, I’ve seen too much stuff in life that I (or a properly knowledgeable scientific expert) can’t readily explain to completely dismiss the idea of the supernatural. Needless to say, I did not try to go back to sleep after that and spent some idle time last Sunday wondering if maybe I should burn some incense, meditate, or ring my bed in a cirlce of salt just to be safe.

Yesterday, though, I finally happened on the metaphor of it all. I figured out what happened in April that caused the first dream and what has repeatedly happened since they that has made this loom large in my mind again and again. I stopped talking to a friend in April. Well, she stopped talking to me. The dream followed a terrible bought of anxiety centered around what I might have done to alienate this friend. I eventually learned what had happened and told my friend that I wouldn’t try to talk to her until she was ready (since she’d expressed a desire to not communicate while she worked through how she felt about the issue between us). Which is when I had the first nebulous, formless dream invasion. A while later, I had a chance encounter with her that I believe was supposed to be anonymous but, due to the nature of modern technology, was not. And then I had the second dream invasion. This third and worst dream invasion followed me accidentally interracting with her via social media (in a very passive way, since Instagram stories just autoplay whatever is up next and I failed to hit the Close button before it started playing one of hers) that had me on edge since it had been over three months since she stopped talking to me at that point.

The spectres haunting me are not the ghostly kind. They are representatives of the growing grief I feel at the present loss of this relationship since it’s been three months since I spoke to someone I used to talk to almost every single day. Sure, there is still hope for a reconciliation, but it is a hope that grows dimmer and more nebulous by the week. I would not have expected this situation to last this long. I would not have expected this situation to get as bad as it did in the first place. I find myslf uncertain of how to resolve this and without the tools to handle it since I’m so far out of what I’d consider the normal context of this relationship. I am at a loss for what to do since I gave my word that I’d wait for her to reopen contact. As far as I can tell, there really isn’t much I can do other than wait or break my word, and even my therapist hasn’t had any insight to offer beyond the patience I embraced and the generally validating idea that there is either more going on here than I know or else this has somehow impacted my friend worse than I could have anticipated.

Unfortunately, figuring out this nightmare doesn’t really help me with the sitution I’m facing. Talking it through with a friend helped a lot, though, which is why I’m writing about it at all. The now-silent friend used to occasionally read my blog and while I don’t know that she has continued to do that since mid-April when she went silent, I suspect that she has continued to read it on occasion, so I’ve been leery of writing much about it here. After talking it through with that friend, though, I at least feel confident enough in my own emotional response to write about it, though I’ve done my best to leave out any specifics since I don’t want to write about more than my own feelings and thoughts on the matter. All of which has been helpful, but it absolutely hasn’t resolved the situation. Nothing has changed beyond how I’m handling the emotions of it, but acknowledging and speaking about this feeling of grief has helped. Even putting that title to it–grief–has helped. It does not weigh as much as the loss of my grandfather did, but it still hits me just as unexpectedly as that grief does. Grief, even when small and not as consuming as the permanent loss of a loved one, is still a heavy weight to carry.

A lot has changed in the last few years of my life. A lot continues to change in my life. I do not want to think about what an endless silence would feel like, if it swept in to replace one of my oldest and dearest friendships, but that idea seems more and more like one I’ll have to live out the more time that passes. Three months is not a lot in the face of the almost eleven years we’ve been friends, but it is not insignificant. It shows no sign of ending (how could it, since its only sign is silence?), so who knows how long it might go on. It could end the day after I write this. It could end because I posted this and she read it, the thought of which has made me delay posting anything about this for weeks now since I’m fairly certain that this being a prompt for our return to communication wouldn’t be healthy for either of us. All I can control at this point is myself (which often feels like further argument for not uploading this blog post) and my actions, so I will hold true to my word by not reaching out and my nature by writing about it in order to make sense of my emotions.

I don’t know that I feel better about all this after writing this post, but I definitely don’t feel worse. The echoing of my grief feels less right now as well, though I’ll admit it could just be the result of this emotional output rather than because I feel more resolved or accepting of things. At least it all makes a little more sense, now that I’ve laid it all out. Which, you know, is maybe worth keeping around long enough to see how I feel about all this a few days from now, before it goes up. It couldn’t hurt, anyway. It’s not like this situation can get much worse from my perspective.