Me: Last night I had a dream that we were driving someplace where the trees were kind of olive-green and silvery black. We were talking about something important but the subject I do not recall.
I know we had just been married (again) for posterity’s sake. We lived with Bowie at someplace with a longer, off the road driveway. It was not miles long or anything, but you could not see the house from the road unless it was winter and all of the leaves fell off the trees.
I was looking down at my feet as I walked down this driveway to the house. Each step felt so heavy and precise. I thought it was raining because my face was wet but I was crying.
The scenes went by in my head like flash cards: I am carrying a lunchbox to your office because you left it behind. My hand in a light fist, knocking on the door. The same hand opening the handle of the door. Your shocked face glaring at me. The woman bending over to cover her bare skin. The lunchbox on the floor. The string of texts with explanations (“It was meant to be the last time”, “…we’ve been together for years”, “My obligation is to you but my heart belongs to her”).
I paced in front of the house for a time before going in. The flash cards overlapping until they became cards being shuffled on a poker table.
“Place your bets, everyone”, the dealer said. I looked at my cards and I had two aces but I did not know what game we were playing. People around me put down their chips and the dealer gave them more cards.
As I glanced around, trying to get a hint of what game this was, I realised that everyone was you. The dealer, maybe 25-30 years old but he had your face. The woman playing next to me, late 60s, bleached blonde and overweight in a matching sweater set, but she also had your face. The man with her? You in your 80s, wheelchair-bound and skeletal.
Different versions of you filled the room. Tall, short, old, young, black, Asian, business types, homemakers, tech bros, waitresses, bartenders, maids…
All different. All still wearing Paul Dahl’s face.
The dealer touched my arm and asked me if I was going to bet. He said, “Might as well go all in, yeah? If you win, you lose. And you already expect to lose so when you’re right you’ve won.”
I looked down at my cards and the aces were two Paul’s winking at me.
Paul: Wth. That sounds like a traumatising dream.
My thoughts:
It feels like it was organising something I have already understand, maybe even something I have already made peace with on the surface, but that still has layers underneath…it is that poker table that is gutting me.
I had the best possible hand—two aces—and still did not know the rules of the game. That says a lot. It is not about whether I had value, or worth, or “a good hand.” I did. I do. It is that the game itself felt unknowable, unwinnable, or rigged in a way that made my instincts irrelevant.
And everyone having his face… that is powerful. That makes it not really about him as a person anymore. This is about what he represents in my internal world. A pattern. A role. Maybe even a kind of emotional archetype—something that shows up in different forms, different ages, different situations… but carries the same essence.
It is like my mind saying: “It is not about one moment. It is not about one version of him. This is the whole pattern, across time, across possibilities.”
“If you win, you lose. And you already expect to lose so when you’re right you’ve won.”
That is a self-protective loop. If you expect loss, then loss feels like control. It hurts less than hope being proven wrong. So “being right” becomes safer than being happy.
But I noticed the aces—noticed the contradiction. I did not fold blindly. I was aware something did not add up.
And those final aces turning into two versions of him winking at me… that feels almost like my mind exposing the trick. Like, “Even when you think you have the winning hand, you have been handed the same thing again, just dressed differently.”
Not to trap me but to illuminate my behaviour.
“Are you still expecting to lose, even when you are holding something good?”
My baseline has been changing lately. More grounded, more present, less willing to contort myself to fit things that do not feel right. My opinions on attachment, power, independence… they are different. Cleaner. Less apologetic.
My psyche took this and ran with it,
“Cool. If we are stronger now… want to look at this piece again?”
Not to hurt me. To update the conclusion.
Because back then, the conclusion might have been: I always lose. Why? Because I did not understand the rules. And, it is what it is.
Now? I am sitting at that table and exclaiming, “Hold on. What game is this? Who made these rules? Why does everyone have the same face? And why the hell am I still playing?”
This dream feels like I was being shown the mechanics of the illusion.
And that last detail—the aces turning into him winking?
No one would say that I am subtle. My brain was like: “Even your ‘winning hand’ in that dynamic was still built out of him. That is why it never felt like a real win.”
But I woke up. I did not stay at the table. I opened my eyes twenty minutes before my alarm went off.
And now I can look at that David Lynch-esque dream and wonder what the hell was I smoking? I can examine it over a damn good cup of coffee and a piece of pie.
Those olive-green, silvery-black trees? I know them but their colouring was different… like driving a road at night for the first time when you have only been on it at dawn.
Same silhouettes, different shadows on the ground.
Same road, same structure, same truth underneath… but the lighting changed just enough that everything felt different. A little more uncertain, a little more distorted, a little harder to trust my footing. Night roads do that—you know where you are, but your body does not relax into it the same way.
That is what this dream did: I did not get dragged somewhere new.
It took something known… and shifted the shadows.
When something familiar feels off like that, it usually means your perspective has changed, not the thing itself.
I am not the same person I was the last time I travelled that road.
Now when my mind revisits it, it does not quite fit the same way anymore. The landmarks are there, but the meaning has shifted. That slight disorientation? That is growth colliding with memory.
This kind of dream is honest (even if it stings). It does not try to comfort me with neat symbolism. It just says, “Here. Look again. But look with who you are now.”
I can see what is different. Even if the veneer tries to make it all look the same.
