Dreams are often pretty bizarre, but then there are those dreams that reoccur. As a child, my recurrent dreams were nightmares. It is easy to look back and sort of explain them away as the products of certain anxieties and fears, but at the time, as the dreams happened, they were simply terrifying and visceral; and it took a while for the emotions to wane and for me to recover my sense of balance. Those nightmares eventually stopped occurring. I suppose there was a trigger that I was no longer exposed to. It did surprise me later on, long after my last recurrent nightmare, when I actually realized they were gone. It was curious; something was different. In this case the “loss” wasn’t sad or beautiful, profound or banal, as so many are. It wasn’t even a relief, not anymore (I had missed that response, at least consciously). It was an absence. Now I don’t really have recurrent dreams, good or bad; maybe the fuzzy details have some common themes, but they are not the exact same dreams. I’m surely glad my nightmares are gone, and I can’t say it is a void there, but I wonder what a recurrent beautiful dream might be like. I wonder what it might be like to wake from those.

∞

In lieu of recurrent dreams, I have recurrent bugs (of course). The flower longhorn above came like a harbinger of the ascending bug photo season in early May on the same little pear tree in my yard for two years running before last. Its absence last spring was rather pronounced the way I saw it, and I have to admit a little disappointing, a tiny sadness. It is a rather impressive creature for which I have yet to do full justice with my camera. Likewise (but not as disappointing) the pear slugs that had been so abundant on the same tree for two early autumns running, were starkly diminished as well last year. I saw but one or two of the slimy little sawfly larvae. So far I’m ringing it up to the dry winter and funny weather in general of last year. A consideration of bug psyche notwithstanding (of course).