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Dream

Michael Murray, age 53

The Dream:

In this dream I am a fighter pilot.

Tom Cruise–Maverick from the Top Gun movie– is my commanding officer and I am his wing man. We are in a pitched battle with an alien race we know little about. We are the world’s last hope. The dogfights are intense and horrible, my fellow pilots blowing up all around me. I have been unable to engage any of the enemy spacecrafts, they’re too technically proficient, but I finally get a lock on one but I do not shoot. Maverick is on the radio, urging me to fire, “ Take the shot, Muffin, take the shot!” But as soon as I put my finger on the trigger an image of the alien pops into my head and all I can think about is the grief all the alien’s friends and family will share when I kill him, and so I never fire.

“It’s not good, it doesn’t look good,” I mumble back to Maverick.

And then Maverick starts screaming at me, and then firing at me. Never in my life have I been filled with such intense feelings of hatred and betrayal. I started firing back at him and now Maverick and I are in a dogfight, and I know that the aliens are controlling our brains, but still, I have nothing but HATE for Cruise. And then he hits me and see his preening, douchebag face as he flies past, laughing. I wake up FURIOUS, a feeling that did not diminish until about 4:00 when my first pot cookie started to kick in.

She’s going fast

A small, college-aged woman is skateboarding down the street.

She’s going fast.

Each stride is so powerful, so confident. Her foot slaps the pavement in perfectly timed intervals as she gathers momentum. Moving faster and faster, everything in concert. She sails past trees, houses, parked cars, evades ice patches. She is an element of nature. A bird of prey coasting through a valley. A vector moving confidently into the future. In a few seconds she’ll be out of sight, but her image will linger. Such vitality in this simple transit, such evidence of a body doing exactly what it was designed to do.

There is no limit or boundary to what she might become.
Free in the world in ways she could not possibly yet understand.

And then she glances over toward me, an astonishment of tears running down her perfect face.

She does not look away, but meets my gaze.

This intimate mystery now a quiet fire burning between us.

And then she turns, strikes the ground a few more times with her foot, and continues forward, growing smaller and smaller before disappearing into this fractured and beautiful world.

Heidi Dream

The dreams of Heidi, our Miniature Dachshund

Heidi dreamdreamdream.

She digging perfect hole. Best hole in world of two-legger or beast. Hole so good. Heidi don’t know where it goes. Heidi don’t care. Heidi just dig. Heidi so young again. So strong. Restored and complete, full of glory. Heidi hot again.

So Heidi digging Hole of Holes when earth begin to shake.

Heidi not scared.

Not the way Heidi rolls.

Heidi turn to show teeth and see Iron Man. Not stupid Robert Downey Junior 70 year-old Iron Man, but vintage Iron Man. Young Iron Man look like robot, look dumb. Heidi not even close to scared. Heidi fuck Iron Man up. Heidi growl. Show Iron Man she means business. No robot stop Heidi from work of great hole artist. Iron Man sends yellow pulse at Heidi for no reason, so Heidi ATTACK!!

Such a good attack.
So many tactics.
So much strength.
Heidi tear Iron Man apart.
Rip into chest cavity, pull everything out.

Turns out he full of Starburst and jelly bean.

Heidi so happy.

Jones

n the delirium of fever I always try to summon angels.

But it’s not working.

I see colours and textures. Earth tones. Curved, like the interior of a cave. The sensation of rock, earth and clay. The mineral walls breathing. It feels primal, maybe pre-human. Ancient beyond numeration. And then it shifts, becomes a flamed coral pulsing. It’s interior biology, now, and I know that I am looking at my lung as it burns with infection.

I open my eyes.

I am in a downtown ER at a hospital in a major metropolitan city on a Saturday night.

It is pandemonium.

The noise here, like waves pitching a boat.

A man is wheeled past, his wife clutching the rails of his cot. Her face red, streaked with tears, her grief wild and open, a force sprung loose from nature and now alive everywhere. A cacophony of beeps and flashes, intercoms crackling and spitting, shouts and cries. So many languages and voices, all saying the same thing. A man doesn’t want to be touched. He prowls the perimeter of the ER threatening violence upon whomever gets in his way. This tension, a nightmare unfettered and mobile. An elderly man, desiccated and bug–eyed on some forgotten gurney looks up at him, “Vater, I vant vater! Vater, I vant vater! Vater, I vant vater!” A drunk man, his shirt barely on, comes spinning into the chaos. He’s trying to evade capture, too, and his arm swings out scattering supplies to the floor—his face lost, self-pitying.

The furious white noise of our suffering inescapable. The staff is inured to it. They have to be. They move through us like we’re bad weather. Grow dim in the distance, and then vanish.

I flip on my cot. Move my surgical mask up over my eyes, try to block everything out. It is hard to distinguish between the real and unreal. My phone, which I am holding like a rung on a ladder, pings. A photo of Jones just after Rachelle tucked him in for the night.

And suddenly he is right there lying beside me. We’re holding hands, his eyes looking deeply into mine.

As if having come from the sky.

As if summoned.

Text Messages

These are the text messages that I received from my wife Rachelle the other day:

*********************************

Rachelle: I already got Jones the Ghostbuster car for Christmas, so I’m not sure we need that.

Rachelle: Oh.

Rachelle: I didn’t realize it was for you.

Rachelle: I’m pretty sure they don’t make Big Jim and his Sports Camper anymore.

Rachelle: That was a different era, Pickle.

Rachelle: Yes.

Rachelle: Back then, people would look at Big Jim or Queen and see Toxic Masculinity, not sexual fluidity, as they do now.

Rachelle: That’s right.

Rachelle: If Big Jim was being manufactured now he would be holding a BOYCOTT CHICK-FIL-A- sign instead of say, a bazooka or a boozy, roofied blonde.

Rachelle: I didn’t say that.

Rachelle: I did not say Big Jim was a rapist.

Rachelle: Okay, fine.

Rachelle: I have no evidence that Big Jim was ever guilty of sexual misconduct.

Rachelle: #NOTALLBIGJIMS

Rachelle: You feel better now that’s all cleared up?

Rachelle: Good.

Rachelle: So back in the day, back when Big Jim was king, you would say, “She got stung by the Spanish Fly,” instead of, “I roofied her!”?

Rachelle: Weird.

Rachelle: But yes, I can certainly see why the Spanish community was upset by this.

Rachelle: It is a good thing the language evolved!

Rachelle: It is true, some of us have made much progress since those days.

Rachelle: Well, I guess what I meant was that if you still wanted Big Jim and his Sports Camper, maybe you haven’t evolved quite as much as the rest of the population.

Rachelle: Just a thought.

Rachelle: Remember your Mindfulness practice. The thoughts Pickle, they come and go– just observe them as they appear, but never utter them in public.

Rachelle: No, never.

Rachelle: Oh God, lots of reasons, Pickle.

Rachelle: Okay, one reason is that your voice really carries.

Rachelle: Well, that’s a problem because it means quite a few people are going to hear your thoughts.

Rachelle: I’m not trying to cancel you, honey.

Rachelle: I just want you to be mindful of what you say, and to use your indoor voice when you’re indoors.

Rachelle: Yes, even though it is flying, a plane is still considered indoors.

Rachelle: There is a lot to remember, it’s true.

Rachelle: So, a box of Jackson Trigg’s Merlot and a Gift Card for Shopper’s Drug Mart? Just like last year?

Rachelle: Okay, my love.

Rachelle: Yes, it is going to be the best Christmas ever!

Jones

There is a narrow alley between our home and the one beside us.

One person can walk through it, but two people side by side cannot. This little passageway is cluttered by fire escapes, locked bicycles, as well as garbage and recycling bins. It’s not unusual to see a man, some shaggy creature forced to the margins, rooting through the garbage for empties.

Last night I could hear bottles clinking. Distant at first–like jade wind chimes in some Japanese tableau– but slowly, erratically, they grew closer. It was probably near 10 at night, and Rachelle and I were lying in bed. Not yet asleep, but having finished all our responsibilities for the day, were devolving in front of some anesthetizing tv. Liminal, almost between states. The window, covered by a blind, was open, and the man who was going through the garbage was no more than six feet from me. If we leaned toward one another and stretched out our fingers, we would have touched.

It was an uncanny, intimate moment.

I could hear him. His movements and energy, his wordless muttering, the weight of his presence, these were all things that I experienced. It felt like some figuration of the ancient past. Before language. When there was only the physical act of fulfilling need after need.

And what if he did not find what he needed?
What if that was no longer enough?

In the next room, a toddler who calls his teachers Mr. Blueberry and Ms.Cookie lies sleeping. I am feeling protective, so Rachelle and I stay still and quiet, waiting for the bottle collector to move on to the next yard, for this weird tension to disintegrate… Slowly the clinking of the bottles begins to drift away, becoming ghostly in the night, and Rachelle and I lie there, both quiet for much longer than we might have expected.

A Dream

The Dream:

Malcom Constance, age 36:

In the dream I was sitting at my local bar having a drink.

The door opened and a man came into the place, and as he walked in everything morphed into slow motion and music began to play. Like in a Quentin Tarantino film. The Wu-Tang Clan, Curtis Mayfield, crazy Tom Waits organ music, something like that. And the guy, he must have been about 50. He wore a three quarter length sheepskin coat and a lime green pant suit. Black sunglasses. Perfect, silver hair, spiked. He was ridiculous looking, like a pimp, but also deadly cool, and as he walked to a table every eye in the place was attached to him. You couldn’t not look at him, you couldn’t not hear the music that lived like an aura, like a scent, around him. You could tell he believed in satisfying all his appetites. Quickly, a crowd of women, and some men, gathered around him as he ordered from an already smitten waitress. I felt jealous, sitting there alone at my bar perch with no music or pant suit or smitten waitress. He saw me looking over at him, and nodded at me.

“There is nothing wrong with loving something you can’t hold in your hand,” he said.

And as if his words were a command, I woke up in that instant, his music lasting for just a beat longer before vanishing.

Woody Fryman

Woodie “The Fleming Flame” Fryman

Montreal Expos Pitcher 1975-76, 1978-1983

After his playing days, Fryman retired to his tobacco farm in Kentucky. He considered himself a tobacco farmer first and a ballplayer second. “Farming is all I ever wanted to do,” Fryman said.

“There wasn’t great money in the game when I started. I can tell you what my early salaries were. I started at $6,000, then I went to $14,000, $18,000, $22,000, $27,000, $32,000. But I was able to stay around. There was a lot of publicity about my bad arm and there’s no denying it lasted a lot longer than anyone figured. But I looked after myself. I don’t drink. I don’t smoke. The cattle business has slowed down now and the tobacco business is just about finished, so I don’t work as hard, but what’s the use of working that hard now anyway?

Sometimes, I think I’d like to return to the game to maybe help some young players. But lately, I don’t know. It don’t seem the same. I don’t go out of my way to watch games now.”

Jones

It is snowing and the world is different upon us.

“It doesn’t make any sound,” Jones says to me, “not like rain.”

How strange the world and its revelations. I think about trying to tell him water is many things. How depending on what it is responding to, it can be rain, snow, steam or ice, but settle for, “Each one of us is many things, Jones, and change lives in our very core. Everything you see is always becoming something else.”

And so what is truth, Jones might ask.

But he does not.

He is smiling, trying to catch snowflakes on his tongue. The walk back takes longer today. He finds a mound of snow and must stand upon it, throwing chunks of it to the ground like King Kong. He walks along each fence he comes to as if a cliff edge. Hand over hand, meticulously grabbing hold of each bar as it presents itself. He circles trees, makes snow angels, rolls around, leaving his scent on this new world.

A neighbour just before our home has a front garden. Short cedar bushes and trees, all of them capped with the most perfect snow. Jones cuts through this pristine forest, a part of it rather than intrusion upon it. Tangled with trees and ice and leaves and snow, his neurons, everything within him firing at full and awesome capacity. He is happy and alive, moving forward into this world as intimately and immediately as possible. His skin as fair and virginal as this newly falling snow.

I hear a tapping at a window and look to our apartment and there’s Rachelle watching. I point this out to Jones, who pops out of his forest. He sees Rachelle smiling so brightly and is transformed. Our dawdling is over. He drops everything and runs as fast as he can to her, to this point of light that simultaneously exists inside and outside of him–the glowing permanence that will centre the rest of his days.