cheese free cheese dream

I had a series of weird dreams last night despite consuming neither cheese nor booze before bed.

I recall bits of a dream. The dream either woke me up or had me in a follow up dream in which I had woken up from the previous dream. Either way I was thinking the original dream was a bit horrible but was the bones of a good short ghost story.

The brief synopsis. And yes, it is not particularly original, and yes I used to watch Tales of the Unexpected a lot.

Man has young daughter. Daughter is probably 4years old. It's my dream so man is probably me and daughter is probably H. Daughter is actually a ghost of the recently deceased daughter. Only the father can see, hear and talk to her. She is real to him. Not a nice dream but it stopped well short of a nightmare.

So I started thinking about my ghost story.

This father is so consumed with grief, his denial so absolute, that he believes the daughter is still alive. He speaks to her, behaves as if she is still there. The only difference is that he now makes endless excuses about why she can't leave the house. His relationship with the daughter plays out in the home while the he manages - just - to keep functioning in his day-to-day life.

His wife is torn. She knows the truth but cannot bring herself to tell her husband and risk destroying him. She plays along. The couple grow old but his ghost daughter is frozen in time, always a 4 year old. It is all rather sad, but the wife has her husband - or enough of the husband he was - and he has his daughter.

Then one day, an old man, the father dies.

After the funeral the mother returns home.

She opens the door. Her 4 year daughter rushes up and hugs her. "Mummy, where have you been?"

A slightly confused look on her face she asks "where's daddy?"