  Vivid Dreams In the few weeks since my grandmother's funeral I've been having vivid dreams. Twice I've dreamed that I was at "the cabin" (though the house and the surroundings were not the cabin of my youth), where my grandma was restored and with us again. The dreams, though steeped in unreality, were vividly realistic at the same time. Grandma was the grandma I knew and loved, before her crushingly slow slide into Alzheimers. In both Grandma dreams, they had an ending that involved us knowing that our time with the restored Lila was temporary and that she would be leaving us again.
In the most recent, she died and disappeared (maybe ascending to heaven? ) and Grandpa matter-of-factly announced that it was time for him to take up smoking. The Grandma dreams both left me feeling distraught upon waking, because the Grandma of my dreams was more vivid than any recollections of her that I can call up by conscious choice. In my dreams, she was as real as real, down to the soft scent of Oil of Olay wafting around her.
I've had other vivid characters popping up in dreams, including one this morning that was full of people from my junior high school who I haven't seen in years (Danny Hunt! T.J. Chandler, Rob Webber, Eric Buss). I'm sure there'd be more to it, if some telephone solicitor hadn't called the house just then and woken me from it. 
