Dreams, many believe, I feel, have something of the occult behind them. They puzzle us with their often-strange messages. Perhaps they aren't at all messages presaging anything, but rather reflections of our subconscious dreads and apprehensions, and sometimes merely somewhat pleasant interpretations, however opaque they seem, of our preoccupations and experiences.

Sometimes we are haunted by dreams that appear at undefined intervals, repeating a theme that may reflect our vulnerabilities and fears. It seems we can do nothing to dispel them. They seem to have their origins in the dim past when we were young and impressionable. We would prefer the pleasant ones to those which trouble us and from which we awake with the lingering feeling of dread they inspired.

Sometimes they seem irrelevant to any kind of accounting; we cannot imagine why our minds would dredge up some of the scenarios we become subject to in our deep sleep when our mind wanders and probes and selects and rewinds.

Last night I dreamed of dry-mopping a house far larger than the home we have, with a series of different dry mops, fretting I would never get the job done. (Dry dust mops with cotton heads are almost impossible to come by; I've searched exhaustively through all the hardware stores and big-box emporiums with hardware/cleaning sections to no avail. Looking on the Internet I have discovered some sites but they don't ship to Canada. The new types of mops are disposable and useless; micro-fibre simply isn't effective, yet those models are ubiquitous; I've tried them all and they crowd my cleaning cupboard; futile, all of them.)

But then there was an interruption; an old friend of mine recently mourning the death of her husband, suddenly appeared in my home, this vast estate, surrounded by a group of her friends who coddled and cuddled her. I call her my friend, but have never met her in the flesh; we have corresponded over a period of about 40 years; she from California, I from Ontario. I proffered my condolences yet again; we all told her how good she looked; not like 80, but 60 years of age. Yet I wondered why she had grown a brush-moustache. How peculiar dreams are.

If I am to dream, why does my unconscious evade my more troubling concerns, I wonder. For always at the back of my mind, there is the anguish I live with at the complete and utter disconnection between ourselves and an intimate family member, a painful reality with which we live and can find no solutions for. We remain deprived and hopeless.