brains are difficult

 It's been very hot here, and even with airconditioning, I've not been sleeping well (it may be more the humidity than the heat). 

Last night I turned my alarm off after realizing it was nearly midnight and I'd not slept yet that I could notice, I've been trying to force myself back into an earlier get-up time for when classes start back up. But last night for some reason I couldn't relax; maybe it was all the concerns about the classrooms that came up yesterday. 

So I figured, well, I can sleep in a bit and then do my workout in the afternoon.

And as sometimes happens, when I sleep a tiny bit later in the morning (I got up around 6:30), I have unpleasant dreams before getting up. 

Last night, my brain did one to me. In the dream, my dad had died (he actually did some six years ago). The circumstances of it were slightly different; I was not up there nor was I in my own home, but I was in a place that was not my real-world home but was more like the house I grew up in. I guess it was also close to Christmas, because I remember there being a tree in the house (except it was one of those flatleaf cedars, rather than the type of Christmas tree a person would normally have)

The other memorable thing was one of my cousins and his wife were there; they had just had a baby girl. And as I was standing there, trying to make sense of what had happened, they quoted to me the "when one family member dies, another one is born" (this was a "thing" in my mom's family; for years when one of the older members died it seemed that one of the younger members had a baby; I think I was born very shortly after my mom's dad died. Except the cousin in question was from the other side of the family). They were discussing what to name her and I remember being irritated partly because I was in mourning, and partly because they wanted to give her my name and that seemed somehow inappropriate to me. 

The weird thing was for several minutes after I woke up, I was left feeling that my father had, in fact, died very recently, rather than six years before. And I still felt vaguely and unfairly irritated at my cousins. It took a while for the feeling to go away.

It seems suboptimal that sometimes dreams generate feelings that are totally fake, you know they are, but you're still feeling them.

I also think that I was probably processing my aunt's death (the cousin in question was one of her sons). I had sort of pushed it aside because (a) I knew she had been ill for a long time, and in a way, it's a blessing for someone with dementia to pass, while her family is sad the burden of worrying about her is gone and (b) I was busy enough and as she wasn't an "immediate" relative I kind of stuffed it down.

And maybe "stuffing it down" sometimes isn't so great.

Hopefully, I sleep better tonight