What does it mean this dream in an old journal?
 

They said he had been reformed

but one night in particular

I knew he’d go crazy. Darkness settled in.

We locked all the doors and windows.

Still, I felt dread

with my children gathered around me.

Others reassured me, “He’ll be fine.”

I knew better.

 

Is it about my father,

now in dementia’s emptiness,

who once took us to see Frankenstein

at the drive-in and how I’ve loved

horror movies since?

How he’d say “I’ll cut the blood

out of you” even after church?

Or perhaps it’s about my toddler son,

born missing a corpus collosum                           ,

with a diagnosis he could someday

be violent. Am I conflating him

with Mary Shelley’s dead, dream baby,

she described in her journal

and then channeled her deep grief,

like mine, to the famous novel?

Maybe, and stranger still,

could it be prescience

about the monstrous cancer

that has now spread through my house–

the bald head, the scars, the terror?