by Don Hall

I generally sleep so hard that when I wake up and my wife asks if I dreamed, I tell her I didn’t because I don’t remember. This is not to say that I’ve never remembered my dreams.

As a kid I had a recurring dream for years that involved a raging river and someone on the other side trying to tell me something. It was more of a nightmare because that dream always seemed to leave me waking up in some aspect of distress.

This morning I was visited by two waking dreams of unsettling feelings of which the import escapes me.

Dana dreams and remembers dreams a lot. She is somewhat of an amateur dream sleuth in that she likes to interpret them to see what the flotsam and jetsam of the unconscious mind is communicating to her.

Exhausted last night, I crashed hard and set no alarm hoping that I could squeeze a few more hours of snoozing into my week. I woke up in tears — real snotty, my face covered in wet, tears. The dream was, as I recalled in the moment, quite simple but seemed much longer.

Joe Janes had died. His brother had asked me to speak at his funeral. I was almost comically grieving and couldn’t keep it together. The funereal guests were many, lots of whom I didn’t know as well as plenty I did. I got up during the ceremony to speak and as I did, tears and snot coming out of my face, everyone (including Joe’s brother Don) got up and left. The lasting image was of me standing over Joe in his open casket, impotently wondering if I should speak to the empty room or not.

I got up, in a truly foul mood, unbalanced but unable to go back to sleep. I cracked onto the internet, read some news of the day, had some coffee, and watched JLo from the night’s SNL. I was not in the mood to head to the gym so, after 90 minutes of dicking around the web, I decided to try for a few more hours of crash.

Two hours later, I leapt out of another dream leaving me in an even worse mood.

Dana and I were living in Los Angeles and I was working as sort of a forgotten extra in a constructed loft above the set of a major television drama. My sister, Vicki, decided to come visit that day with her new husband and father-in-law (which is only bizarre in that my sister is a lesbian). Dana goes to some sort of work so I decide to drive Vicki and these strange dudes around L.A. in my Prius.

L.A. in my dream looks like CNN footage of the Middle East and, at one point, a band of children with machine guns stop us in the middle of the road to take the car. Vicki and her guests get out but I gun the accelerator and now I’m in a Fast & Furious style high speed chase (the kids also had a car) and I drive so recklessly that I total the car into the windshield of a huge truck, the Prius bent completely in half and perched like a broken bug in the window.

I try to call Dana but get her voicemail and make my way using the flashlight on my phone to let soldiers on the streets know that I represent no harm.

Suddenly my mom is there as well and I’m explaining what happened and neither my sister nor my mother believe a word I’m saying.

I wake up in a seriously bent state, tell Dana my dreams, which she sums up as “You’re having some anxiety” and then covers my nose with goopy mask makeup as a beauty experiment.

As I understand it, dreams are more a DADA collage of bits and pieces floating around the subconscious than a road map to meaning. Like a horoscope, they mean more what you want them to mean rather than something concrete. Honestly, I don’t know what these dreams meant and I don’t really care much. I’m just in a crummy mood as if these weird events actually happened. I’m still a bit sad about Joe’s passing (yet he still lives and I’ll see him soon as he’s coming to Vegas for Christmas) and kind of annoyed with my mom and sister despite my post-dream understanding that if I wrecked the car as badly as in my dream and was still perfectly fine, I’d question the authenticity of my story as well.

I think I’m glad I don’t remember my dreams because I now have to shake them off, recognizing the negative feels I’m stewing in are the result of fantasy experience. If I had to wake up like this every time I slept, I think I might not sleep anymore.