I had two dreams last night in which Irene was in danger in some way, either hurt or lost. I’m not sure where these dreams, separated by several hours, came from, particularly since she is in better shape this week than last from her broken ankle, so you’d figure my dreams wouldn’t be filled with fear, but they were, several hours apart.

In the first dream, we were walking through the woods nearby our home with another couple I don’t think I was ever able to properly identify, perhaps even my parents (which would be odd, since my my father is no longer with us, having died in January), when a couple of deer ran toward her and crashed into her, staggering her but not knocking her down. As Irene screamed, calling for me to come help her, the two deer kept between us so that I could not reach her.

Only now they were no longer deer, but rather some deer/moose hybrid, with big bulbous snouts melded with their otherwise deerlike bodies. In the dream, I didn’t think there was anything odd about this transformation. I kept running up to them, trying to get past them, punching them in those bulbous snouts, but they would not yield. I kept swinging at them, trying to dance around them, but I was never able to reach her. I woke with her cries still in my ears.

In the next dream, hours later, we were in a completely different environment, a large city, leaning on a railing watching some huge public event. Fireworks, perhaps? I don’t think it was a parade. The specifics are gone now, but as the crowded event, whatever it had been, breaks up, I lose track of Irene. No problem, I figure, I’ll just call her, and we’ll decide where to meet. So I pull out my iPhone, but no matter what I do, I cannot make a call. Either the screen freezes, or skips on the horizontal and/or vertical like an old-fashioned TV, or simply keeps turning itself off. I walk along, cursing at the phone, wondering how I’m going to find her.

Eventually, I do wander across her, with no sense of whether it had been through some deliberate action or accidental, somehow having found her on an upper floor of an apartment building whose hallways were just as crowded as the streets we were in at the beginning of the dream. I’m relieved to have found her, but we’re densely packed together, unable to move, and everyone around us is arguing how to disperse, whether to walk left or right, up the stairs or down. We’re not getting anywhere, and as I wake, we’re still trying to figure out how to get out of there and home.

Both times when I woke, she was right there next to me, which is all that matters.

Whatever it was my subconscious was trying to tell me, I’m not sure I deciphered the message.