Dreams

Vol. 2

This might be a bit of a short one, but I’ve got some time this evening to bang one out, and it just so happens that I had a couple of dreams last week. And no, this is not at all what I promised would be coming up next. But an opportunity has presented itself, and I'd hate to squander it. 

So let’s take a look, shall we?

Whether this is important or not, I had these dreams during the same sleep. A nap actually, from around 9:30am or so until about 11am. I had the day off, so I hit the couch with my 10-month-old daughter Olive and had a little snooze. 

 And there I had these two dreams. The first was that Olive and I were headed somewhere, her buckled in her carseat and me carrying her down the driveway. As we get to the end of the drive, I realize that I’ve forgotten an item or to do something, I’m not sure what exactly, so I put her down and head back. 

As I get to where I round the corner of the house and hit the door, I think to myself that I shouldn’t have left her there. So my stomach drops and I turn back to my little daughter, there in her carseat, facing the street and all alone, and hurry back over to her. 

And there in the street idling is a large black van. I know everyone’s Facebook feeds are different, but I keep seeing Mike Rowe on mine lately trying to give away this big decked-out battle van. The van pretty much looked like that, except that it was all black; rims, paint, windows.

Some of the windows were rolled down, and there were a bunch of people inside. I even remember seeing at least one woman holding a small child in there. And oddly enough, I also recognized the face of a guy I grew up with. 

I hadn’t really thought about this too much between the time I had the dream and now, but the associations I make when I think about this particular guy (we don’t keep in touch these days, but many years ago you could have called us friends) are perhaps of interest and worth exploring.

And look at that, we happen to be in my own fun little space here on the internet. So I guess that’s what we’re going to do.

I mean, of all the people I’ve ever known or my mind could invent, it was this dude sitting in the van. As I said, we were friends as kids. We lived in the same neighborhood, went to the same schools up through high school, and therefore hung out quite a bit. He was a good enough kid, played in the band and was always hustling, selling candy bars, delivering newspapers, that kind of thing. 

It also happens that the first time I had ever seen pornography was at his house. This was in grade school, third or fourth grade I would guess. He had it pinned up (remember folks, this was the days before the screens, and print was it) behind some regular posters of Spiderman or whatever in his bedroom. I don’t specifically remember what the images were, just that I didn’t know what the hell I was looking at at the time.  

Later on I would hear through the grapevine that this guy was up to some greasy stuff with fresh-faced high school boys long after he had graduated high school himself. That is just hearsay though, and I can’t say for sure that that is at all factual. However, call it the power of suggestion or whatever, but this would not surprise me if it were true.

This guy certainly has other credits to his name that are commendable and mark him as an upstanding citizen, and I don't mean to disregard those completely. I don’t want to give this guy away, so I won’t describe him in any further detail. But if I am being honest, these are the things that come to my mind when I think of him; a nice, polished public persona with a seedy, sexual deviancy lurking just behind the curtain. 

So what, then, does it mean that this particular fellow showed up in my dream in the way that he did, seemingly ready to snatch up my baby into an ominous blacked-out van right in front of my home, in broad daylight, and what might I infer from that? 

Well, let me take a tenuous jaunt into some dark territory for a paragraph or two, dear reader. I, like some of you I’m sure (another large part of you will consider all of this crazy and ridiculous, and I hope that you are right), am alarmed at some of the stories and things I’ve seen and heard in recent years about the predation of children in some way or another. 

Whether it’s slimy billionaires with private rape islands, elected officials and public figures using their clout and connections to have their way with kids, or strange gender goblins in the classroom taking it upon themselves to convince their students of damaging ‘truths’ about themselves, the specter of grave danger to children hiding in plain sight behind carefully constructed and publicly-sanctioned masks is something that I find profoundly disturbing; and much more so these days, now that I have a little one of my own who will be out there participating in this world in the not-too-distant future. 

Perhaps what I will take away from this dream is a recognition of my anxiety around my sweet little baby being a part of this society which often seems crawling with predators of one type or another. And although the dream ended with the van driving off without the people inside doing anything and my girl safe and sound, it was too close of a call for my taste. I had made a poor choice by leaving her unattended as I did, even for just a couple moments, and it came dangerously close to having something really ugly happen. 

For now, this child’s safety is my responsibility. A lapse in my attentiveness and supervision could open the door for tragedy. On the other hand, that can be done to excess. I also have to give her room to breathe and be herself, and cannot save her from every harsh word or scraped knee (to do so surely invites its own problems and perils). 

A lot of this is premature on my part, and will really only need to be practiced later on, when she's older. Until then, though, as helpless and vulnerable as she is, I am taking this dream as a reminder that I need to be on the ball when it comes to my daughter, and to be her guardian at least until she learns jiu jitsu and can be her own guardian. 

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The other dream that I had that same morning is somewhat stranger in its own way. The details and circumstances are a little fuzzy, but the meat of the thing was as clear as can be.

So there I am at home. It's a small place, single story. There with me, for some reason, is a woman about my age. I'm not sure if she is significant or not, but I will do a quick description. 

Some friends of mine had a college roommate named Liz. Whether this was Liz in my dream or just a dead ringer lookalike, I cannot say. But it was one of the two. In any case, there she was, in my house.

The real Liz was extremely obnoxious, hammered drunk every time I saw her, a bottle-blonde with tiny little legs, a big old gut, and lots of makeup. My kind of lady.

So me and maybe-Liz are in my house, and AOC (the moniker I've assigned to my girls Ashley, Olive, and Chloe) isn't around. And all that I can recall about our interaction is that maybe-Liz is thrilled to present me with a juvenile alligator. 

Yes, you read that right. Eyes full of delight, she announces that she has this thing for me, and as soon as the words leave her mouth, here comes this hissing reptile out from underneath my kitchen table. 

Jaws open, this small alligator, 3 or 4 feet long, skitters across the floor right at me at high speed. I pull a Jackie Chan maneuver and scramble up the wall, bracing myself near the ceiling between the door jamb and a bookshelf. As I am up there, this little gator is jumping and snapping at me, trying tenaciously to get hold of my leg. 

I maintain my position up near the ceiling, and eventually the gator loses interest and pads away to some hiding spot within my house. Maybe-Liz is nowhere to be seen, probably rummaging through my refrigerator looking for Jell-O shots or leftover pizza or something. 

Sooner or later I descend from my perch, and instead of searching all the nooks and crannies for this hungry dinosaur, I just get the hell out of Dodge.

And that was it, that was the whole dream. Now, for the fun part. Let's do a little analysis. 

First of all, I'd like to think that I wouldn't just surrender my home to this sloppy party girl and her nasty little lizard (Liz, lizard…hmm). I hope that I was heading out to the garage for my pitchfork and coming right back to conduct an eviction. But I'll never know.

A second matter of interest is that my Jackie Chan suspension trick is not something I would be able to pull off for very long in real life. In the dream, however, I felt like I could hang there all day. The fatigue that I should have felt was not there in the dream. 

Last week I noticed that my wedding ring was fitting a little more loosely than usual, and that my belt was doing the same thing. I've been eating considerably healthier lately, and I think it's beginning to show a little. Perhaps my physical ability in this dream is a reflection of that? It's a nice thought, but who knows. 

Although these dreams occurred in the same nap, I don't recall them as being connected. They were two separate dreams, but observe that they share the same basic theme: tangible threats to my family and home. 

I suspect that this is probably a normal thing, for a new father to be hypersensitive to threats, real or imagined, to myself and my kin that I had the luxury of not paying much attention to previously. 

Take the predation of children as an example. Something that I was aware of and concerned about before, sure, but now I have real skin in the game. Therefore that subject will be taking up a lot more of my mental bandwidth in the years to come, and my behavior (and dreams) will be a reflection of that. 

And perhaps these kind of manic, unrealistic dreams are my mind’s way of highlighting the possible dangers that exist to my daughter, wife, and home, and thereby sharpening my vigilance in the real world, resulting in a safer environment for all of us. 

I'm not terribly concerned with a gator getting into our house and snacking on my leg (although we did have a goddam wallaroo break loose some time ago, so who the hell knows), but keeping my little one out of the hands of the groomers and various creepozoids out there is definitely something I'm going to be paying attention to in the years ahead.

And just in case my awakened mind gets distracted or takes its eye off the ball, it looks like my subconscious will hopefully be there to get me back on track.