To Sleep, Mischance to Dream

Posted on July 28, 2002 in Childhood Dreams Reflections

I sleep at odd times of the day so that I can see visions. I don’t put much stock in interpreting dreams: I prefer to just take them for what they are — random firings of the neurons that sometimes make interesting associations — and scry them for material to use in my waking life.

Dreams are a crazy salad of all kinds of things. I find both pain and happiness in them. This afternoon, at the end of a two hour power nap, a long epic ran in my head for perhaps twenty minutes. At the end of my nap this happened:

My father is sitting in his dining room on a piece of the old black couch we gave or threw away many years ago. He’s dressed like Michael Douglas in Falling Down, white shirt, brown slacks, mock tortoiseshell glasses. Every time I pass through, he tells me I am a princess who needs lots of trinkets. I pass through the room at least twice, on my way to other oneric segments that I have forgotten. When it repeats for the last time I talk back and he charges at me. He tries to drag me down the hall to my room for a beating. I jump on his back and pull on his head.

It’s with trepidation that I write this because I have cousins and other family out there who remember a nice “Uncle Bob” who was always proud of me. For the first time, I am acknowledging in a place where they can see that he wasn’t a very nice person to me sometimes. He was explosive. He hit. Once he broke my ear drum. He used to interrogate me about the facts of the Catholic faith and probably did more than any other person to drive me from it. He called me stupid and an “ammunition dump” because I liked to read. They have probably wondered why I squirm when they talk of how fondly they remember him. They shared drinks with him. They never really lived with him and never saw what he did to his sons. He was not entirely evil, but every time they start to talk about him, I feel like the family outcast, the fellow who spoils the legend. For this reason I prefer to stay away from them. They wouldn’t understand. They think he is a saint.

When he shows up in my dreams, I feel scared. He is my demon, the harbinger of ill feeling.