Horrendous night

For the past few weeks, I've hit rock bottom in the Well of Grief. I don't know why. I guess we never do. And I've been wondering "how do we do this stuff? Does anybody have a Handbook on How to Grieve Properly? If we block it, it makes it worse and only comes back stronger. If we make ourselves busy, again, it only prolongs the grieving process (or so I'm told). But to stay in pain and suffering night after night, day after day doesn't seem right either. It feels horrible; feels like I'm slipping backward with no way out.
Last night I went to sleep. And had the most horrible dream. I dreamed that I had wished David back into existance. Sounds nice, doesn't it? Every night I go to bed and wish and hope and pray that somehow he would come back home to me.
But in this dream, he came back. Not the loving, smiling face as I picture him in my thoughts, but as an ethereal blackness. Not a person, just a darkness throughout the house and at the same time I realized that there was no oxygen in the house! I panicked! No oxygen! Well of course after he died I had the oxygen company pick up all the cylinders, both full and empty, as well as the giant cylinder that lived in a dusty corner of our basement. The one reserved for emergencies when the power went off.
"How could I do that? When one day he'd be back?" my brain screamed at me. No oxygen? Now he'd be gasping for breath. He would die all over again, but this time instead of a peaceful, loving death, it would be a horrible suffocating painful death.
I woke up trying to scream and scream and scream out that vision. But my throat was paralysed. Not a sound came out.
I cuddled his bathrobe close and drifted off to sleep again.
Then dreamed of the Answers, the Keys to this "how do you grieve properly?" solution. And now I forget most of them. But I do remember a few. One is to take things in baby steps. That's not a new concept, but one I'm obviously not doing these days, or it wouldn't have surfaced in this dream. I need to focus on the little things that pop up. Deal with them first, rather than with the whole overwhelming package of grief.
Another Answer or Key or whatever that came to me is actually somthing I learned when David was first diagnosed with COPD. This is what you say to the disease "pull up a chair. I see you, I acknowledge you, I won't deny you. But I'm not letting you take over my life. We will co-exist".
At least that's a start. And I awoke this time with sun streaming in my bedroom window, feeling much better to face the new day.