Consorting with the Dead

   Last night I went to bed early, and consequently enjoyed a deeper sleep, with dreams.  The main dream I remember was only unsettling after having woken up and thought about its implications. While dreaming it, there was one ominous moment, but over all, I enjoyed the dream action in the same manner I would any real life adventure. 

   I was out walking at night in some unspecified urban city dreamscape. I crossed into a parking lot and as I headed toward the curb a car pulled up next to me. The driver was a friend of mine--I think it was Joe Grub, because he was definitely in the car, and I'm pretty sure it was him behind the wheel--and as the car slowed to a stop next to me, the rear driver-side door opened, revealing an interior jam packed with friends. There must've been four or five in the back seat section alone, and at least three up front.  The one guy by the door in front of me was Greg Grub--he was naked.  It's difficult to convey the tone of this dream to carry across its significance undistorted to a reader unfamiliar with who Greg was as a person, when he was alive. Greg very seldom displayed emotion; he hid that behind an impassive mask most of the time, when he was sober. The immediate impression I got upon seeing him naked in the back seat of the car packed with a bunch of our friends piled in was that his nudity was a perfectly ordinary aftermath of having returned from the dead. In other words, it was no big whoop.  

   Furthermore, his expression remained taciturn as in real life, but with the vaguest smile haunting his face, a clear indication he was having the time of his death so to speak, joyriding with a bunch of our friends in a dream I was lucky enough to have been drawn into. Everyone beckoned me to crawl into the car with them, which of course I would have done had there been one person less in it: as it turns out, the car was so crowded, that it became evident at a glance that if I'd tried to squeeze in, there would be no way to shut the passenger door behind me.  I had to decline, as much as it seemed fun to join in on their joyride through the midnight city streets. So I halfheartedly waved them on, and watched as they drove off with Greg.  

   Dreams are weird, and so is the process of recollecting them.  There was a moment when Greg had stepped out of the car, and stood out by the curb, communing with me. I describe it this way because we didn't speak to each other. This also reflects a major aspect of our relationship, when we were best friends for thirty-six years, until the day he died in late January, a couple of years ago. We had always been able to exchange our ideas and impressions to one another without saying a single word. I was just happy to see him carousing with our friends. Matt Golins was in the car along with Joe Buffington, plus four or five others. Eventually the car sped off in my dream, leaving me stranded in the parking lot. There was an air of people out and about, so I wandered over to the nearest building, which looked to be a restaurant of some sort. I opened the door and stepped inside. 

   It was about half filled with customers sitting at tables together who all ceased eating and talking to one another and stared at me in a matter-of-fact manner that stopped me in my tracks. They were all elderly gentlemen who I suddenly realized looked very much like pretty fresh cadavers, themselves.  One of them whispered something to what must have been the elder patron. I got the sense this underling was asking if they should "wack" me.  A general murmur of table talk spread throughout the room, as they continued to dispassionately regard me. I mumbled something about being sorry that I walked in to the wrong place, and I noticed the "godfather" among them make a single indication holding up his index finger to his associate, a gesture I interpreted as meaning "it's okay, let him go." 

   I walked out of there trying to look as if I weren't in a hurry. I had to keep my cool with these guys, since they seemed to belong to some mafioso dead dead gang or something. They were all still wearing their fancy burial suits, along with their mortuary makeup which only lent them the faintest appearance of being dead. Once I stepped outside I felt a sense of relief at having escaped them. It really felt as if I had intruded on some private meeting they were attending. 

   It wasn't until after I woke up and began thinking about this dream that I really began to sense the disquieting implications of it, insofar as how generalizing interpretations can go. There's a paranoid-tinged sense that in the dream I was consorting with the dead. First with my best friend who was enjoying a nighttime excursion with his pals going for an evening joyride through the city in their car. Then the unnerving scene where I stumbled into that restaurant with a bunch of recently buried dead guys that looked to have just stepped out of their coffins to hang out in their local diner. What if this is some sort of premonition? Thankfully I've been able to shrug that thought off. If anything, after letting these imaginative episodes register in my waking mind, it's the finer points of the dream that offer me consolation. For example, the godfather guy lifting his finger to let me pass back outside. Getting to see my best friend before continuing on his exhilarating ride.  As the Grub and I used to say in our old inside joke, "this means something." 

   The part I liked the best was noticing the barest of smiles that haunted my best friend's face, after we conferred in silence together out on the street, and he was swept away again to party on with our friends.  I feel almost as if the dream may be telling me that perhaps I've just missed out, in the most unexpected way, on the opportunity to have joined both parties (that of the joyride and the dead). That I've been granted my singular journey on my way towards a greater and no less fathomable destination in what remains of my own waking life. It leaves me with a feeling of confidence that such foreboding omens that could be misread are not worth harboring. That paying attention to the "devil in the details" always pays off, whether in real life or in dreams. 

Greg & I  with Joe Grub once upon a time at Pennsic War 

The Iris Opens

   Over the past many nights the floodgates have opened wide in my resting mind. 
A turbulence of scenarios and imagery have possessed my imagination while I slept. 
One evening it was a random pack of animals attacking the house we stayed in. 
Several months ago one of the more vivid dreams involved a house with a hidden interior. A beautifully constructed wooden panel in the foyer slid over to reveal an entrance to a concealed portion of the estate. Once inside, it was revealed that there was more space within than without, including a vista looking out onto an ocean. An elder gentleman in the finest attire lived there. Returning back through the carved wooden door brought one to the original mundane house. The strange entryway was a portal of some sort to another dimension, much like dreams themselves. 

   The word dream goes back to Old Norse draumer—signifying merriment and noise, and to the Proto-Germanic draugmas—'deception, illusion, phantasm'—and in Lithuanian, 'friendship,' strangely enough.  The German word for it is traum, and it doesn't take a stretch to make the connection with both trauma and drama. I can't help but suspect that traumatic events play a key role in shaping our dreams, and by extension, our penchant to act out dramatic plays onstage as actors. Dreaming has always played a central role in my desires. Maybe that's because it's a key factor in directing all of our actions, from the moment we are born until the pivotal event of our deaths. The many associations of the word dream do not end there. The Old Norse word for 'ghosts' and 'apparitions' is draugr, which branches out to connect with Old High German triogan (and German trugan) meaning 'to decieve and delude.'  In Sanskrit the word druh implies 'seeking to harm,' and the Avestan druz indicates lies and deception.  Dreams may be the pivotal fulcrum upon which our very senses, while awake and concious, have been built.  Dreams are the foundation of our reality.

Dead Man's Party Dream

   So last night I dreamed I was in a dead man's party, we were milling about in a quasi- workplace scenario, a lot of people from around the establishment wandering and prepping for a celebration because word came out that none other than David Bowie was showing up as a guest, so everyone was as well dressed as they could be for the occasion, and I remember that my hair had been trimmed and my wife had buzzed the sides in a sort of mohawk that was concealed however due to having grown a sufficient amount of hair on the top of my head which fell over to the sides covering the shaved parts.  

   There was a real feeling of excitement buzzing in the air as people prepared and I wandered past a table where a few middle eastern folks sat enjoying olive leaf wrapped foods and rice with sweet aromas of spice drifting upward.  One man in particular sat at the picnic table with a turban and his eyes were extremely dark and commanding, the color of burnt sienna, and as I passed by his stare drilled into me as if beckoning I come over for a visit, so I did. As I sat across from him on the opposite bench, those eyes never once flinched. He asked me how old I was and while I replied I was born in the sixties he informed me he was from the 1850s. I quickly did the math and offered with surprise, "So you're one hundred and seventy years old?" and although he didn't answer, his silent repose was sufficient for me to know it was true, and I believed it. 

   At this time I rose up and suddenly, food began emerging up from inside me--not throwing it up from my stomach, but rather regurgitated entirely preserved slices of cake that would fill my mouth until I had to finger them out in chunks. I kept scooping with my two main fingers these almost entirely whole pieces of frosted cake, one after the other, which would drop to the floor beside me. It was embarrassing enough that I wandered off to the side to continue this action as unobserved as I could manage. After seven or eight cupcake shaped pieces were scooped out (they were only deformed slightly enough from having been compressed by the shape of the interior of my mouth plus the small amount of saliva  coating them) other foods began to materialize within my mouth from out of nowhere. I scooped out some yam, and at one point I scooped out a large chunk of a beet.  It dropped to the ground by my feet. 

   At another part of this strange dream, I found myself in the main hall when a sudden buzz of excitement spread through the crowd. Right then I noticed my old friend Andrew Phillips (who took his own life in his San Francisco apartment fourteen years ago) standing there, and we noticed each other right away, and walked towards each other and hugged. This electric moment of the dream stood out with crystal clear clarity to me, and I cherished the lucid five second embrace as it galvanized itself into us. After letting go of each other and stepping back as if it were nothing too extraordinary to have met at a party such as this, we looked over to a newcomer entering the room. David Bowie was dressed in such a spectacular fashion that I can't even describe it in familiar terms.  There were shades of his old characters, a tweak of Screaming Lord Byron but he contorted himself by squatting, as if in some Russian dance posture, rendering his body into that of a dwarf, and he hopped like a toad across the floor while everyone gasped in disbelief at the sheer grotesque oddity of it. 

   He hopped across toward me and nimbly leapt up onto the table in front of where I stood, and there was a moment in the dream that I can't exactly recall but in which he leaned in toward me in greeting. I can't remember what he said, nor what I said back to him, but this exchange between us remains charged with a significance that evaporates like steam from my mind when I try to think of it. Suffice it to say, I made contact with some dream incarnation of the thin white duke and it was really rather incredible. At no point during the dream did I stop to think that both Andrew and David were examples of people who have died in real life.  This strikes me, in retrospect, as being somewhat peculiar and meaningful.

   The dream went on to become hazier as Bowie worked his way through the adoring crowd and I wandered off to regurgitate more foodstuffs that kept cropping up into my mouth, and which I had to keep scooping out with my fingers and watch as they dropped to the floor in piles at my feet. A lot of the foods were sweets and desserts but there were mashed potatoes and other normal things as well. This is a recurring theme in my dreams to be honest, and I can't exactly pinpoint what it means. It wasn't until I woke up from the dream that I realized my best friend Greg Grub wasn't in it, despite having parted from this life himself last year toward the end of January. His absence from this dream remains quite conspicuous, and while making my morning coffee today I asked out loud in my mind, "Why didn't you come to the Dead Man's Party, Grub?  Andrew and David Bowie were there!" As the daylight diffused into my kitchen through the window over the sink, there was no reply at all, just silence while I stopped for a moment to think.