Wife's bad dream, 2

Wife woke up unusually early this morning, while I was typing out a quick e-mail to D, before the boys got up. She said she had had a bad dream, where a gunman had been firing randomly into a crowd and hit her smack in the chest. I pulled her into a cave right near where it happened (it was a dream), got a doctor, and then sat by her for several weeks until she got better.

Just before writing this, I looked back at the last time I reported a bad dream of hers. Again, I showed up in the dream in some kind of a caretaking role. It's strange -- not only because of our dynamics the last couple of years, but because we have been drifting so much farther apart lately. She says she still loves me, although I have trouble mapping that to anything I would call "love". And honestly a lot of it is probably me, because I know that I don't respond the way I once would have. I don't pick up on openings for even the occasional hug or caress, that I once would have jumped on.

But maybe, at some level that comes out in her dreams -- maybe at the least she still needs me.