Two nights ago I had a dark and lonely dream. Vague now, but it centered on my father’s garden, an anchor of my childhood home.  At the beginning of the dream, my family and I worked that garden…turning the soil, shaping rows, growing vegetables we’d share with neighbors who would walk by. As the dream proceeded, my family died off one by one, and it seems the neighbors did as well. Eventually, I was left to work it alone, with neither family to help nor neighbor to share. It was a sentence of solitude, a lonely task I had no choice but to continue until finally, one day, I too would die, and the garden would return to weeds. In the dream, I had the sense that when that did happen, I would go to rejoin my family. But until then, work that had been a joy had become a dreary, unrewarding task. I awoke in the dark, overwhelmingly sad. The loneliness was intense. Everyone was gone. I was alone in the world, sentenced to continue the garden in solitude, with no one to share in either the work or its fruits.

I believe the loneliness I felt both in dream and on awakening was social, not existential (though who’s to say where first ends and the latter begins?). And I think the dream came out of recent thoughts and conversations. I’ve been considering of late what significance we retain in the world once we’ve died and the last person who remembers us dies as well. (The answer, of course, is, “None.”) Also, I related to someone only a few days ago that my father had once said that dying was something he had to do alone, that no one could help him do it. And finally, in a conversation the day before the dream, I commented to a friend that an element of personal growth involves allowing ourselves to need others, and allowing others to need us. I think all these thoughts came together to birth my dream.

I am by nature a paradox: I am solitary and needful of solitude in large chunks; but I am at the same time needful of knowing there are people elsewhere and available to me. I am intensely afraid of being alone in the world. It is a lonely place.
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