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
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