Dreaming of Bonnie

I can't say I'm the kind of person whose life has led me to attach very much cosmic significance to dreams, but you can probably understand how nice it feels to experience any interaction with Bonnie any more even if it has to end with waking up and discovering that it was "just a dream." I'll say more about this on another day.

My first dream

(I posted the following to a mailing list on 7/23/97.)

Then last night I dreamed I got e-mail from Bonnie. It was a short and reasonably-authentic-sounding reply to a letter I'd sent her months ago. It didn't sound new, though ... it sounded like it had been written at the time of my letter and then somehow got "lost in the ether" or "stuck in the pipe" (or whatever) until now.

I'll tell you what the letter was about, even though it doesn't seem to have any special meaning as far as I can tell (in the dream I didn't seem surprised to get it, though you know how that can be). Anyway, the background of this is that when Bonnie was getting the radiation treatments one of the things I wrote to her was that I was having a parent-l flashback that if she still had breastmilk she should put some on her skin. I was worried that this might be in kind of questionable taste, though.

So the dream letter from Bonnie was a reply to that letter. It started out with either "Funny you should mention milk" or "Funny you should mention that" and went on to describe something along the lines of that she could squirt milk into a bowl or other container but wasn't good at squirting it onto her hand.

"'lost in the ether' or 'stuck in the pipe'"

Hey, it could have happened, you know. Take a look at my Bonnie via DejaNews page to read about how this did happen with one of Bonnie's newsgroup postings.

"what a dramatic dream goodbye from Bonnie would be like"

(I wrote this on 7/25/97 in response to a response to my dream message above.)

When I had tried to imagine what a dramatic dream goodbye from Bonnie would be like, what first popped into my mind was a reenactment of the airplane scene from the end of "Casablanca", or at least the part that goes (start your search engines!) "And you never will [leave me]. But I've got a job to do, too. Where I'm going, you can't follow. What I've got to do, you can't be any part of." (Obviously Bonnie would be the one saying that, not me.)

But if instead I just got occasional dream e-mail, I suppose that would be fitting and original and puzzling.

My second dream

My only other dream involving Bonnie was in August, and also consisted of my getting e-mail from her. All I can remember about it was that she was complaining about not getting enough "hits" on a new homeschooling-related page she'd put up (a page that only existed in the world of the dream).

I guess that this means that the world of my dream consciousness (or whatever you would want to call it) as it relates to Bonnie is a normal world where Bonnie is still alive, rather than some sort of cosmic "messages from beyond" thing. Well I can certainly appreciate that, and look forward to any more dream e-mail that I may be privileged enough to receive.

Bonnie's dreams

Bonnie has said some things about dreams that still haunt me.

One was in a cheerful "Greetings folks!" note she sent out on December 16, 1995, shortly after her mastectomy. Here's the paragraph I'm thinking of:

So, even though I just can't believe any of this is happening (I have decided to blame it on the 1966 partial meltdown of the nuclear power plant near Detroit - it seems like everyone in my hometown has (or had) cancer) and I'm kind of hoping that I'll wake up from this totally bizarre and fast moving dream, I'm also not too depressed, just fightin' mad and determined to beat this and get on with my plans to be an obnoxious old lady.

Another was in February of 1997 when Bonnie wrote some angry messages about how she hadn't followed enough of her dreams in her life and now it was "too fucking late." She got some good responses. On my end, one thing I talked about was the books we'd both read about cancer survivors who described their cancer as having been perhaps the greatest "gift" of their lives because it got them out of ruts and made following their dreams a high priority again. Many times Bonnie had spoken in the same vein, for example on July 11 1996, exactly a year before her death, she said, "I see cancer as a catalyst for change, rather than a killer disease."

Or back on February 16 1996, Bonnie had said:

My feeling, right from the diagnosis, is that this isn't life-threatening, but rather a great big kick in the ass reminder that I've got to change something or do something.

But I haven't figured out what that is. Maybe it's something on a small scale like saying "I had cancer 50 years ago, refused chemo and survived." Maybe it doesn't have anything to do with cancer at all.

I haven't found the punch line yet.

I wanted so much for it all to happen exactly that way -- that once Bonnie had triumphed over her cancer nothing would be able to stop her from blazing though dream after dream with vision and passion and style, etc. etc.

And if you read the wonderful tribute For Bonnie by Bonnie's childhood friend Lynn Crowder, at the end you will see a moving dream-related piece that Bonnie wrote when she was 14 or 15.