In last night's dream, there was a zombie-ish apocolypse, as in it was understood that the things we were dealing with were undead, but they just looked mostly normal. At the start of the apocolypse, I was separated from Isaac (my fiance), and I spent most of the dream trying to escape the undead horde. A big section of the dream took place in a walmart, bass pro shop mix (it was a walmart but had the look and vibe of a bass pro shop, taxidermy animals and such), and I was avoiding undead which had fully infiltrated the wallmart, all while trying to help people escape. During the chaos, I happened to find Isaac, and I immediately started crying and hugged him as tight as I could, as I had finally found him (this was after what felt like days of wandering the walmart). Me and Isaac then tried to find our way out of the walmart, but had trouble doing so. During this, I had to execute a child who was turned into a zombie, and his dad didn't have it in him to do it (spoilters for Tell Tale's the Walking Dead). It wasn't literally Kenny and Duck from TWD, but it was definitely a mirror of them.
Once me and Isaac finally escaped the Walmart, we saw that the horde had caught up to us, and there was no way to escape. Before I could find out what would happen next, my dog woke me up because he wanted to play. After I went to the bathroom and played with my dog a little bit, I tried going back to sleep to find out what would happen next, but it didn't work, and I just had to continue my day.
I was visiting my grandmas house when I was shocked to see most of it was gone. She had “downsized” it after my grandpa died. The entire second floor was removed like a chunk had been sawed away in a clean line, forming an L shape with the back wall. The house also on the outside appeared only a few inches wider than the front door, and had been painted a new color (white). The inside was the same size as it is in real life.
I got emotional at seeing the house I spent almost every day at while my parents were at work now totally gone and replaced with a shell of what it was.
Once I got inside, my grandma had set up an entire little area for my grandpa, including one chair by the tv if he wanted to watch tv and one by the radio and some books if he wanted to read and listen to music. I didn’t have it in me to tell my grandma that grandpa was gone and wouldn’t be back. It was a kind of pain I'm having a hard time describing now looking back at the dream. I felt the loss of the day grandpa died paired with the overwhelming sense of failure that I couldn't protect my grandma from this kind of delusion that kept her trapped in the cycle of loss and regret.
Eventually to my shock, grandpa was back somehow, and he was talking and acting like he wasn’t dead. I decided to record him so I had a copy of his voice and mannerisms since he was acting how he did before dementia took away a lot of who he was. My aunt Teresa thanked me for filming him, since she also wanted a record of him after he was gone for good. I eventually concluded he must be a ghost or spirit, and I was devastated that he didn’t end up in heaven like he always wanted to. I once again didn’t have the heart to tell him he was dead. He was so happy to be with us, and was telling me something about the civil war, but I can't remember what it was.
My brother Donovan bought some food, it was Chinese food and seafood like king crab legs and lobster, although my uncle Robert didn’t want me eating any of the sea food because he hates me, so Donovan snuck me some. Then I woke up.
I don't usually include my thoughts about my dreams in this journal, but here I felt it was necessary. I've been sick today, my body dry heaving and throwing up everything I keep down, and although I know on a rational level that its because I probably have food poisoning, on an emotional level it feels like a rejection of the pain I felt in the dream. For a long time now, not since the first few months after grandpa died, I have been enjoying my dreams with grandpa, as it is my only opportunity to see him now that he's gone. The times I'm lucid, I even tell him how the family is doing, and how much we all miss him. But this time, I felt gross, like I was seeing the world I knew torn away. Even with grandpa there, we were all aware that he wasn't truly back. That he was some spectre of who he was, even in the appearance of closeness to his pre dementia self. And in all of that, I saw my grandma alone and scared, holding onto not the memory of my grandpa, but the deluded hope that he would come back as if he were only on some business trip. Something like Linda's final cries over Willy Loman's grave. I felt like I had failed my family, and in that realization, my body felt the need to purge itself of that guilt in the most visceral way it could. Its all bullshit, of course. The only thing my body is purging is some spoiled food I didn't realize had gone bad some days ago, and the dream was just that. A dream. And now I'm awake, and grandpa is still dead. I should call my grandma.