Johnny Roxx

When my father called
2002-02-12 19:35:05 (UTC)

Dreams

At first I just sat there staring out the window at the
different shades of brick on the building behind mine
across the alley. I replayed his words, or my filtered
remembrance of them, over and over in my head. It was clear
that the words had no meaning. Whatever possessed him to
make that call had nothing to do with anything he actually
said. I didn’t know how to judge his tone, since I had
never even spoken to the man as an adult with the ability
to make those kinds of relative interpretations. It was
clear that this line of inquiry was going nowhere fast. I
resolved to pretend it never happened and returned to
reading my article on how to keep one’s boyfriend without
giving up one’s cat.

Despite my avid interest in discovering what psychological
damage Cosmopolitan was doing to women across the nation
and how I might use it to my own ends, I awoke on the couch
sometime after midnight. My stomach was growling with
hunger, and I had a sense of impending doom and a fuzzy
feeling that I’d been having a dream that wasn’t Cosmo-
inspired. It wasn’t until I had the first spoonful of
Cheerios in my mouth that I got a brief flash of what I had
been dreaming about. It was something about the lake up
north, a cabin I wasn’t sure was real, and a fear that I
had been left alone for good. Whatever it was, it wasn’t
pleasant, and I was grateful to be awake.

It made me think of a time when I was about five or six and
my mother was still alive. I don’t really remember the
details, but some feelings of fear stick with you. Dad was
out, as usual, and for some reason Mom and my older sister,
Kate, were outside. I must have been taking a nap and woken
up to find no one around. I remember running around the
house, tears streaming down my face, looking out the
windows in vain for them, sure that I’d been abandoned
forever. It was such a non-event that my sister said she
didn’t even remember it at all when I asked her about it
after Mom died. I guess that even if the fear only lasted
for five minutes, it was potent enough to leave a deep
impression and suspend a sense of time in my memory. The
fear had turned what I did remember about it into what
seemed like a week alone in the house without food or human
contact. Funny how that works.

I’m not sure how the lake or the cabin fit into the whole
thing. Sometimes it seems that in dreams, our minds just
pick things at random, piecing together impossibly
disparate experiences, time periods, and locations. My
dreamsmith closes his eyes, opens the toybox of memories,
pulls out three or four things from the jumble, and does
what he will with them. It’s sort of a bullshit bingo
approach to subconscious psychological room re-arrangement,
if you ask me.

Eating cereal at that hour with my hair sticking wildly up
in the air and my clothes still on (for the most part, at
least) didn’t make the whole moment seem any more real than
the dream was feeling. Then I realized that my father’s
call must have been a dream too. I stacked my dish on top
of the other 20-odd leftover dirty cereal bowls – time to
do dishes again – and checked the caller ID log on the
phone. Nope, it was real. He did call. That was enough to
motivate me to test the waters of another fear-inspired
dream session, so I went back to the bedroom and slept like
a log.




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