Dreams

Back in the seventies, when my sister and I first lived together, one of her amazing abilities was to remember dreams.  Feature length, Technicolor, wide screen, starring some amazing people.  Equally mesmerizing was her ability to recount them to the people who missed the original screening.  We were generally jealous of her relationship with Clint Eastwood.

Any dreams I had back then I could generally ascribe to something that had happened to me, something I needed to do, something current in my life.  Dreams I remember from my childhood were often bizarre.  One dream I had often was of speaking to a person I knew, but the person was wearing a mask.  I would methodically pull off mask after mask as we spoke, but never get down to the face I knew.  Another dream I had growing up was of falling, and then actually awakening with a start and knowing I was safe.

My father died when I was a young adult, thirty five.  Jan was even younger, twenty five.  It’s hard to lose a parent at any age.  I dreamed one night of being terribly angry with him because we had forgotten to have a little family celebration of the parent being twice as old as the child.  The next day I remembered he had died in February, at seventy, and I was not thirty five until March.

We talked of dreams as we sat together in the evenings.  Mom and Jan remembered far more of theirs than I ever did.  Mom said Dad was often in her dreams, but he never talked.  Jan, on the other hand, still held full scale events featuring all her friends and siblings.  And I still had only mundane dreams.

My dreams pretty much stayed that way until I began dealing with the pharmacopeia of drugs that was sprung on me as a result of the stroke.  Then I would find myself having to open the doors for hoards of Black Friday shoppers before I had finished stocking the shelves, still dressed in my nightgown.  I became a world expert on classes of drugs in short order, and learned what to refuse to have circulating in my blood stream.  I think all my dreams now are the product of blood thinners and statins, but the result isn’t too bad.

Of all the dreams, I still remember talking with my dad about flying dreams.  I would run down hill with all the speed I had, and at the bottom fly into the air, but only for a short distance before coming back down.  Dad said he had flying dreams as a child, too.  He ran down the hill and took off, but he actually flew.  He could fly over his world for as long as he wished, until he came back down.

Considering all I know now about his childhood, how remarkable.

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