Midafternoon Dream

I’ve had a debilitating cold this week, and I’ve been in a strangely altered state, sitting in the sunlight, feeling almost sort of stoned, and trying to follow Felix’s view of the world. There’s a lot of digging to be done, holes into which pebbles must be tossed, and tractors to admire. There are cows grazing in the distance, which must be heralded by vigorous pointing while uttering the word cow. Even the walk down the driveway is eventful. There’s a wheelbarrow, and a generator, and a whole garage brimming with tools–tools! Glorious tools! There are piles of mulch and gravel, and a hose with a turnable spigot, and a railway tie to walk along, and fruit on trees or rotting on the ground, and places where gravity gets your feet going fast. And so much more. I can’t even take it all in once I start noticing.

Consequently, I am exhausted, and today, Felix took a nap at exactly the same time that I was craving one, and I’m no fool: I hurried into bed and promptly fell asleep. I had deep dive dreams, the kind that pull you under and deposit you in some very vivid elsewhere. I was dreaming about a place I hadn’t thought about in decades. It was a building in Brooklyn, the Democratic Club, where my father used to work sometimes in the 1950s, painting and fixing things up. He would take my sister and me with him, and while he worked, we would play in a big front room with chairs pushed aside on a wooden floor, and our voices would echo in the space, and we’d go up on the stage and pretend that we were famous. We felt that we were part of something important and special, and could not imagine a finer playground. (It occurs to me suddenly that this might be the origins of my identifying myself as a Democrat, long before I knew anything about politics.)

But isn’t it amazing the random stuff that dreams turn up? Our heads are vast warehouses, and you never know what unexpected goods may come out on the conveyer belt or where we may be carried. To an observer, I may have looked like an old lady asleep in her bed in the middle of the afternoon today, but I was fully immersed in another time and place, enjoying every moment of it, at home in a world that is no longer.

My sister died twenty-two years ago on January 21, so I was thinking about her a lot this week, and wishing, too, that she could have known Felix, but it was quite a sweet surprise to meet up with her in the Democratic Club. I tried to linger a little longer in the dream as consciousness returned, but I couldn’t ignore the sunshine slicing through my bedroom window and repeating itself in the dresser mirror, or the quotidian clicking of Monte in the next room at the keyboard, or the gradually assembling details of this life I love. With a pang in my heart, I left my sister behind, but maybe I’m still there with her.