Family Dreams

       

Family Dreams
 Noel Laflin
November 4, 2001

"Strange as it seems,
There's been a run of crazy dreams." - Tim Rice

With Alexie - 1972

“I had the wildest dream last night,” my mother would often say at the dinner table.

These were words by which to ponder, if you had any sense of curiosity in our family.

“Well, there I was in the symphony orchestra,” my Mom began one evening.  “I was in the violin section, awaiting my solo.  Obviously I don’t play the violin,” she confessed.  “In fact, it didn’t seem to matter that I can’t read a lick of music  . . .   never have.  But there I was, nonetheless, dressed in an elegant black dress, just waiting for the spotlight to shine on me, stand and perform.”

We all shifted nervously in our chairs. 

“So,” I prompted, “what did you do?”

“I woke up  . . .  in a sweat. Be good enough to pass the rolls, please?” 

My Dad cleared his throat. 

“I had a weird dream, too, last night,” he began.  “I was sitting in the family room reading the paper when, all of a sudden, Noel came tearing through the house heading for his bed room.  What was strange,” as he looked my way, “was that you were about four-years-old again, dressed in your pajamas and hugging a teddy bear.” 

At the time of this telling I was nineteen.  I leaned in closer, elbows glued to the old wooden dinner table and nodded for my father to proceed.

“I thought this was a little odd,” he continued, “so I got up to investigate.  When I looked in your room, four-year-old Noel had jumped into bed and was giggling and wrestling with teenage Noel, trying to wake him up.  Now, can someone please tell me, just what the heck does that mean?”,  my father asked.

Dad shook the cobwebs from his mind and then inquired: “Is there any coffee left, Vi?”

My Mom poured him a cup.

And so it went, meal after meal, dream after dream.

“I had a dream about pop last night,” my mother would begin.

“I dreamed about Lake City again,” my Dad would chime in.

“Rebel came back in my dream last night,” I interjected one evening...

Eating stopped and all eyes turned my way.  Rebel, the first family dog had been dead but two years and we all missed his being under foot at the table, begging for scraps, listening to our tales.  Often, we would watch him twitch in his sleep, paws tapping the floor as if he were running in his own canine dream.  He died suddenly, one twilight evening, at the close of dinner.  His burial by flashlight in the back yard, with a makeshift cross gently pushed into the fresh turned earth and the tears we all shed as a family unit that night were seared into each of our memories.  My sister locked herself in her bedroom and cried herself to sleep, refusing to come to the hastily arranged funeral. 

Later, my brother sat in his car, pounded the steering wheel and lamented, “If we feel this way about a god damn dog, how are we supposed to feel if Mom or Dad dies?”

Finally, I drove off with tears burning my own eyes.  I am not sure how my parents coped during this time following the burial.  When I returned home, Rebel’s basket and toys were nowhere to be seen.  The reminders were hidden in the garage, I later found. The pain was too fresh - too real...

“I dreamed that Alexie dug Rebel up,” I began. 

The new puppy, Alexie, (who adopted us one Saturday afternoon and stayed for life, after Dad, the man who disliked pets, or so he said, fed the stray cold hot dogs), licked my hand under the table at the mention of her name.

“The dream started with the puppy scratching at the door to be let in,” I continued.  “Once in the house, I saw that her paws were muddy.  I had a foreboding and went to Rebel’s grave under the apricot tree.  A fresh mound of dirt was off to the side and the grave was uncovered.  It was also empty. Then, I was suddenly in downtown chasing a very dirty Rebel.  Each time I approached him, he would turn a corner and disappear. As I turned that corner, I could see him briefly, muddy from snout to tail, looking over his shoulder as he rounded the Five-and-Dime and then crossed over to the old theater and yet another and another old familiar building - only to disappear again. This went on all night, until I finally woke up.  I never did catch him.”

I paused, lost in thought.

“What’s for dessert, Mom?” I finally asked, trying to shake the dream.

My Dad shook with the heebie-jeebies.

My mother spoke of Lazarus coming forth from the tomb.

It was just another dinner at our table - another dream revealed.

As my brother, sister and I eventually left home and went our separate ways, the relating of dreams was saved for holiday family gatherings.  It did not seem to matter what guests might be in attendance; dreams were meant to be shared with all.  If no responses were forthcoming, I would egg my Mom on to tell us about the prophetic dreams her mother had.  My grandmother had some the spookiest apparitions of which I had ever heard, involving visions of sons hurt in battle thousands of miles from home and a former husband’s death foretold with uncanny accuracy.  If I could get my Mom to start in on some of these themes, then dinner dreams amongst the guests and family would soon blaze forth.  It usually worked like a charm.  I myself never tired of hearing about my grandmother’s insights.

Of course, some dreams were too disturbing to even acknowledge, let alone retell. 

How, for example, could I repeat the dream of my own death or that of a partner or parent?  With time, former loves and even the greatest dreamer of all, Mom, would die, and dreams of them would eventually follow. 

Unless it was a vision of comfort, however, some dreams were best left unremembered and least of all shared. The ghost of one former lover waited nearly a full year before following me on a trip to Africa, filling my evenings, under the watchful starry gaze of the Southern Cross with dreams of illness, sadness and eventual acceptance of a passing.  At times this ghost was as elusive as Rebel, staying one corner ahead of me at every turn.

And what about those dreams that leave you weeping at three in the morning?  So sad and overbearing, that one cannot stand to recall them to oneself, let alone share. No dinner should ever be so interrupted, nor memory rekindled with such melancholy.

But over all, ours was a family of dreamers who liked to share those nocturnal wanderings with one another at mealtime. I don’t remember at what age I was when I first tuned into these discussions.  I encourage my eight-year-old to tell me her dreams, and I in turn, relate funny and interesting ones to her. I need to ask my father if dreams were something he and my mother always shared, even before three children entered their lives.     

I will do that when next we visit.

Lately, I have this nagging feeling that there are many questions for which I need answers and Dad is the last parental provider of such information and insight.  I don’t like this premonition that time for sharing family dreams is slipping away.  Yes, I will ask him soon.  I only hope that he remembers, as the last year has been cruel to my father. Pneumonia drove him into the confines of a hospital, convalescence nursing center, home with two full time caregivers, brief hospital stay once again and eventually back to his own home once more.  He now appears to be comfortable and physically stronger, but his memory plays tricks on him.  Time, old age, disease, and recent high fevers have done irreversible harm to his short-term memory.

Hopefully some of the long-term dreams of better days still exist. 

Actually, I know they do, as he frequently dreams of his childhood in Lake City, Minnesota. He is young again, he tells me, hanging out with his best pals, now long gone.  Dad is the last.  He sees them only in pleasant nighttime excursions.

He asks me if this means something. 

I tell him, yes, old friends are calling, watching out for him, as I envision old Mark Twain, reliving boyhood days on the banks of the Mississippi, yearning to join Huck and Tom in an eternity of mischief and pre-adolescent adventure. 

I shake off the nostalgic vision.

“More coffee, Dad?” I ask him.

Although the nighttime wanderings that my mother, father and I shared with one another have lodged themselves in my memory all these many years later, I can’t recall the dreams of my brother and sister.  They both must have spoken of them also, but I failed to record them.

Having shared a room with my brother for many years, I am aware that he talked in his sleep a great deal.  Once he shook me awake and carried on a multi-part conversation, with a non-present friend and me, insisting that I partake in the discussion as well.  He had no recall of the incident in the morning. 

Upon his return from Viet Nam in 1970, I learned not to try to awaken my brother too abruptly, as he was liable to jump violently in his sleep or try and grab me, mistaking me for something better-left-behind in a jungle far away. 

But I don’t recall his dreams or those of my sister.  Do they remember the sleeping visions of our parents? 

Of this, I will need to inquire at the next family holiday gathering, which will include dinner, and then coffee with dessert, of course.

Then I know how to open the prospective floodgates of nighttime memory.

“I had the wildest dream last night,” I shall begin.

           

Family Dream Team - Aug 8, 1993