Last night, I talked to my father on the phone. That is weird for so many reasons. One, he’s dead. Two, it was in a dream. Three, in my entire life, I never had a dream about my father unless he was in a coffin and definitely not talking.
Ten years ago, give or take a year, I confessed to him that he was always dead in my dreams. He was rarely a part of my dream life at all, but if he showed up, he would be in a coffin somewhere unusual, like a bathtub, or in a tree, or in my kitchen. This never bothered me as a dreamer. I would see the closed coffin and know it was him. The dream continued with others in my dream cast also ignoring him.
My father was not happy about being dead in my dreams. It didn’t matter that in my dream I was apathetic about it–it was just how he materialized in my subconscious. It didn’t matter that I had no control over my dreams. He felt misrepresented. Never mind that he couldn’t remember ever having dreamed about me at all. (If you knew him, you’ll understand exactly what to read into this.)
Five months after his death, he made his first appearance in my night plays and he still wasn’t visible. Just audible.
It was very much like a real phone conversation with him when he was alive. He talked about his work. There was a squirrel mentioned somewhere. Cats, of course. Some self-deprecating humor. Only in my dream state, I couldn’t focus on the speech very well. During his monologue, I was thinking what I used to think when I talked to him as a living, alert person–should I stick to the usual script, or say what needs to be said?
As in life, I stuck to the script. I partially realized that I was sleeping, that he was very much dead, and this wasn’t real.
And then there was a pause. He said, “Sorry about that.“
I woke up during the delivery of that line. I don’t know which that he was talking about (or which that my subconscious wanted to bring up). It’s a good thing I woke up. There was never an apology in our original script and I wouldn’t have known my line.
