The Gift of Dreaming

My father showed up in a dream of mine last night. He has made intermittent appearances in my dreams since he died 13.5 years ago.

I have always been a vivid dreamer. It was not until my father and his best friend Jim died (both suddenly, within exactly one month of each other) when I was in my early twenties that the dead started to show up in my dreams.

My father and I discussed the meaning of dreams when he was a still alive. He was of the opinion dreams are just your brain trying to tidy up and do not have any higher meaning unto themselves.  I thought this was a super depressing way to look at dreams–a classic example of science robbing a process of potential magic. I told my dad I thought they meant more than that. It seems like a logical place for forces which don’t have an easy in during our everyday lives to get in touch with us. I also don’t think a process which can be intertwined with so much beauty and emotion should be explained away as simply another detail of neuroscience.

Most of the dead folks I have loved have only showed up in my dreams once or twice. These meetings frequently take place in busy dream settings: Jim came and ordered a cup of coffee from me in a dream some months after he passed away. I told him we missed him and he acknowledged he missed us too. Then, he took his coffee and moved on. I have had similar dreams with other loved ones who have died: there is a brief appearance where I express my missing them, they gracefully acknowledge the loss, and then they move on without much explanation.

My dad keeps showing up though. The first few years after he died, I would get excited to see him in my dreams. I had one dream he pulled his white Toyota Camry into the driveway of the house I grew up in Mesa: he opened the door and said he wanted to go to Costco together. In these types of dreams, I didn’t necessarily forget he was dead. I just thought I had found a loophole in the universe and was going to get to spend just a little more time with him, like I was pulling a fast one on Death. The feeling of joy of getting to take another ride to the store with him is so crystal clear: even though it was a dream, the feeling it gave me was so real, I still carry it with me.

For another period of time, I would have dreams where I would run into my father unexpectedly at a crowded event of some kind. We would try to find a place where it was quiet and we could talk, but we would lose each other among a sea of party goers. People would come and grab my arm to talk to me individually about something, and I would look up to see he was gone.

For a while after that, he showed up in dreams together with my mother. In these dreams, they were still fighting with each other, as they did when he was alive for 30 plus years. These dreams carry the same sense of wastefulness as their fighting did years ago. I would wake up from these dreams exhausted and sad.

Lately, the past year or so, my dad has been showing up to check on me. That’s what it feels like to me anyway. In these dreams, I don’t feel the overwhelming joy of getting to see him like I did in the Costco dream but he also does not drift away from me before I can speak to him either. In these dreams, I am calm enough to have small conversations with him. In the first dream like this, I remember telling him about Basil and how much they have in common. Last night, the most recent iteration of this type of dream, he wanted to know how I was doing. Did Basil and I have everything we needed? I told him we were very happy and doing fine. I remember he held and squeezed my hand. We were going to walk somewhere together. I wanted to talk to him about his writing and tell him I have been working on getting his stories online.

I woke up before I got a chance to do that. I used to feel cheated or sad when I would awaken from dreams with my father in them. Now when I wake up from this most recent type of dream with him in it, I feel a sense of peace I did not feel before in the earlier iterations. I feel more like these chances I get to see and talk with him are small gifts from the universe, which I am fortunate to receive.