"Please Don't Go, I Want You to Stay..."

I love my bed. It is extremely soft and comfy, has two fluffy pillows on top of it, and these drugs make me want to sleep for twelve hours. So why did I get so little sleep last night?

First I woke up at 1:14am for no reason. And then I had a really poignant, but extremely creepy, dream.

I grew up with two cats, Muffy and Fluffy. Both were older than I am and died at the ages of 18 and 19, respectively. I was completely devastated both times as I was extremely close to them and still miss them terribly. I dealt with the impending loss of Fluffy to mouth cancer by latching on to Muffy even more, but with Muffy there was nothing to cushion the death.

So in the dream, the first part of it I remember since there was more before this, I was in the first house I grew up in, located in Panorama City, except that this house was darker and larger. I've had dreams in this environment before. Fluffy came walking up to me, and a little part of my rational consciousness asserted "aren't you dead?". Both had shown up in the dream before and I honestly didn't know if they were since I wasn't clear on whether this was taking place in the present or the past. I asked my mom and she said yes, both Muffy and Fluffy were dead. Suddenly Muffy appeared, with a bundle of what I named yellow carnations, even though the flowers weren't carnations in retrospect. I asked my mom where the carnations had come from, and she said she didn't know. I said "Well, they're both here. Muffy and Fluffy." My mom and dad believed me.

So I was enjoying my time with them, when I noticed that Fluffy was in a way starting to fall apart. She wasn't alive, she was a shadow who could not grow anymore the way that living things do, and the shadow was beginning to fade. I realized that they were being held here from moving on by my desire to keep them here. So I started to tell her "go into the light!" Each time I did this her body degraded, into muscle and bone, until there were just a few drops left of nerve endings and tissue. I kept telling them to go into the light, but they were being held back by my desire to keep her here, as I couldn't let her go in my heart. I finally managed to do it.

Muffy was much more solid, and we kept playing together. At some points in the dream she turned into a boy resembling Chris who I was attracted to(Just because Chris is basically the epitome of what I'm attracted to, not because she/he symbolized Chris in any way.). At another point, the dream started taking place in the Winnetka house.
We were in my room, and I could feel her/him beginning to fade, to turn into a cardboard cutout, since nothing new could come from her since she was not alive. The implication of fading is that the spirit becomes little more than a shade, a memory, forever bound to the earth until they are released. So I started letting her/him go in my mind, telling her to go into the light, which was heartbreaking. But all at once I felt her/his rage, because he/she wanted to stay here with me. She/he didn't want to be let go. So even when I had let her/him go enough so that he/she could pass on, he/she stayed, bound by their own will. All of a sudden lights in my room began to flicker and go out, and the clock went out. I ran out of my room and into the teen room, where my parents were. They blamed it on faulty wiring, like the wiring in their bedroom, and I was hoping they were right. However, then the lights in the teen room began to flicker and I was terrified.

This is when I woke up at 3:15, turned on all of the lights, and didn't go back to sleep for a long time.

Besides being horribly creeped out, the message of the dream about letting go really resonated. I've had a really hard time letting go of Muffy's death, as she and I were closer than I have been to a lot of humans. After her kidneys failed and she was lying on the table about to be put to sleep, I wanted to tell her that it was ok, that I knew she had to go, but I couldn't. I kept saying "Please don't go, please don't go" instead. I regret that. But in a weird way little part of me is healed, though not fully.