I don’t usually remember my dreams but in the last week I had two about Ralph.

Dream 1.

I am in a school building with Ralph When he heads to the boy’s bathroom, I can’t follow him. But he doesn’t come out, and he doesn’t come out. I decide I must have been pre-occupied and not noticed him come through the door. Or maybe in the dream I am pre-occupied, enjoying myself, and then I realize I have  I missed him coming out the door. I start to search for him, walking down various corridors but stopping along the way to have small happy adventures. I never find him and wonder how I’ll explain to people that I mislaid him. When I woke I felt unsettled, as if the dream needed to be finished. I felt the need to double check that Ralph was indeed in the bed, safely asleep.

Dream 2.

Ralph announces he has fallen in love with another woman and asks my permission to get a divorce. The woman and I talk. I ask if she is prepared to take care of Ralph if/when his condition worsens. She says yes. She seems perfectly nice and normal, but I find it odd that Ralph says this woman, whom I evidently know slightly, is his intellectual soul mate. I feel a little hurt since before we married or even dated  we were intellectual buddies.

My stronger reaction, though, is curiosity. I ask Ralph what he talks about to the woman, who wears a 1950s-style black dress and wide brimmed hat. After all,  he and I don’t have more than perfunctory conversations most of the time. Ralph tells me they talk about real estate, the subject that used to obsess him but that he now avoids discussing—somehow in the dream I think to myself about our awake life. We are in a room together, maybe a restaurant, where I begin to worry about the woman’s motives–is she after his money [that part of the dream probably comes from reading Anne Patchett’s The Dutch House in which a second wife cuts her husband’s kids out of their inheritance]. Suddenly I realize Ralph’s kids are protected by his will. Relieved, I decide to let the divorce happen. He and the woman are very grateful. I am glad to be making Ralph  happy and also happy that now I can move to a smaller house and live alone.

One dream of losing Ralph physically, one of losing him emotionally. Losing or chasing to lose. What these dreams reveal is both obvious and murky:  ambivalence, ambivalence, ambivalence.