Dreaming

According to one of my social worker/counselor friends (I have many--I reside in a social worker-friendly habitat), every person in my dream is actually me. Same for you, by the way: she says that everyone in your dreams is actually you, some facet of you, some aspect of you that needs attention.

I dunno. I mean, I see the therapeutic possibilities, but take the following: Several days ago I dropped off 16-year-old Hugh at boarding school for the first time, an action about which I was and am profoundly ambivalent. "Boarding school," in my world, translates into "CODE RED! CODE RED! Family breaking down!" Or, more succinctly: "This mom is Bad." So that night, I dreamt.

In my dream, Hugh is a baby again, a chubby little guy in a onesie sitting in a baby carrier and sucking his hand. I go through a doorway into an empty room and put down the carrier, then turn back to the first room to get the rest of my things. I get distracted; there are lots of people; I have to answer questions; it's hard to push through the crowds. . . and when I finally make it back to the room where I set down Hugh, I discover it wasn't a room. It was a train car, and the train has left. He's gone and I can't find him. I'm screaming and running and trying to get someone's attention--I've lost my baby! I've lost my baby!-- but no one listens and he's gone.

Now, should I read that dream as telling me something about two different aspects of myself? Couldn't it be, isn't it, simply about me and Hugh, about the incredibly complicated love a mom bears for her teenaged son, about this new phase we find ourselves in?

And then there are my favorite dreams (so much better than the baby-losing ones). Often set in a place from my past--the house I grew up in, my high school gym, the alley behind my aunt and grandmother's two-flat in Cicero--in these dreams, my dead ones are alive, as they were at their best. But I'm me, now. These dreams are always ordinary--nothing horrifying or unsettling. Just ordinary, apart from the fact that 51-year-old me is hanging out with my 44-year-old dad or sitting over coffee with my 70-year-old grandma or shouting at the latest inane antics of the Conservative government with my much older beloved professor in his London flat, except we're now much closer in age.

Should I be embarrassed to admit that, superstitious as it may sound, I view these dreams as, well, as essentially visits? OK, yes, I should be embarrassed. I know that. While I do believe in some form of afterlife, I don't believe the dead come visiting. Really, I don't. And yet. . . the fact is that I experience these dreams, these moments outside space and time, these splashes of amazing grace, as just a bit more time, another chance to visit with the folks. The key is the ordinariness of it all.

Well. . . maybe also that I don't fuck anything up, that I don't get distracted, that I don't fail to see something crucial, that I don't lose any babies. I spend time with folks I love and I get it right.

Hey, Hugh, I've been dreaming about you. I'm dreaming I find you, baby. I'm dreaming I get it right.