The Stuff of Dreams

How does the novel end?

There are dreams that you experience during sleep that maybe you recall upon waking up and there are dreams that encapsulate a vision for your future. Lately, I'm experiencing both.

The other night, for the first time in over a year, I dreamt about my ex-wife.

The dream was she and I going through a picture album and deciding who would get which pictures—photos of our wedding, visits to Six Flags, the New Orleans Zoo, a Halloween party we threw in Wicker Park. It was... pleasant. Not bitter or angry, not even sad. It just was.

Since the divorce and subsequent exit from Nevada, I've had thoughts about all that happened, wrote a book about it, but never felt any sense of peace regarding the careless and casual destruction fomented by this woman I loved. I've been at times furious and others hopeless but not once have I felt like things would just be fine. After the dream, I woke up feeling they would be fine. Maybe better than fine.

I guess this is what scarring up feels like. Healing, maybe.

I have no wish to see her again or ever communicate with her. That hasn't changed. The damage was done, the betrayal complete, what was a gradual transformation for her and an overnight nuclear warhead for me cannot be bridged. Yet something has shifted and it's good.

Himmel texted me Wednesday—

In my twenties I had the dream of somehow becoming a significant artist in one of the largest cities on the planet and, in many ways, I did. I played jazz for a time, I started a theater company with friends that lasted nearly twenty years and became the soil that nourished everything from nascent careers, blossoming families, individual journeys artistically, as well as hundreds and hundreds of unique, wonderful artistic experiences. I was the host of a nationally known story slam and told stories in front crowds large and small.

Been there, done that, right?

Sitting here in my bunker in Wichita, the question begged is what's the next chapter in the bizarre and mundane novel of my time on the spinning rock? Do I return to the big city and chase after the same dream of my younger days or do I seek another crossroads and become something, someone different? Do I go to another city and carve out another place for myself? Do I stay here with my family and find my way through this tiny place that I aggressively, manically left thirty-five years ago?

If, as George Bernard Shaw famously wrote "Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself," then who do I want to create in this final few chapters? How does the novel end?

There is both a liberation and an oppression to the challenge. I can make any choice as long as I commit but, keeping in mind certain built in limitations of age, gender, and flaws inherent, a nearly limitless list of possibilities are represented. Pig farmer? Reclusive author? Postal worker/poet? If I do go back to Chicago, am I merely pursuing what I've already achieved or looking for a different path in a city I genuinely love and have roots in?

One morning, roughly 3:00am, I startled myself awake with a nightmare that involved anxiety about getting things done at work, falling behind on bills, and stymied by an unending search for one of my shoes. Something about my credit score and being called into the General Manager's office for a dressing down and a sense of panic and dread. It was unsettling to be shocked out of the David Lynchian world of the backwaters of my brain. I got some water, had a smoke, and went back to sleep.

It indicates that while I actively choose to avoid prioritizing these elements of my day it's all still in there. These sorts of dreams exist, I think, to clean out the pantry of the lima beans that you bought for some reason but have no intention to eat and if you don't toss them or donate them to a organization that can will sit there for years.

While I hate experiencing these dread the daily grind nightmares I see the benefit. I reflect on them briefly and it reminds me that my vision of my own future is never going to be measured by bills owed, money made, or credit scores (although having two matching shoes is kind of a thing for me). It underscores that most of my choices on this road have been motivated by the experience of creating new and interesting stuff rather than the metric of success adopted by most people. Stability and security (while still working for The Man in order to avoid living in the streets) are illusions people seem to need to keep moving each foot in front of the other. I acknowledge the illusion, embrace my moments of chaos, take my lumps, and carry on.

There is a possibility that my stance on these things is a justification of those choices rather than a philosophy I've lived with, connecting the dots of my circus geek life and coming up with a picture I can live with, but it amounts to the same thing. What perhaps was a random existence becomes a philosophy and I'm sticking to it.

When I was much younger, I had a recurring dream. In the dream, a world of grayscale, I'm standing on one side of a violent, thrashing river—perhaps 100 yards from the other side. The wind blows in random gusts and the water responds in plumes and sprays, daring me to try to cross. On the far side is a figure but I can't quite make him out. I try to screw my eyes harder to see his face, to read the expression, to connect. And, because it is a dream, the face becomes closer, clearer, and while I am aware of the invisible rage passing between our gazes, I can see that he is trying to look into me as well. I get the feeling the He is Me, that He may have something important to tell me, something vital. The feeling that I desperately need to connect with this person on the far side of the raging nature is overwhelming and, as if my need is so powerful that it can move the confines of the physical world, I notice that the river begins to shrink and He and I are closing in one another. As we get closer, as if the very act of minimization infuriates the river, the wind and water become even more violent and hurricane-like, making seeing Him even more difficult. This continues until I can almost see Him clearly, confirm that He is Me and receive that urgent message...

...and then it ends.

I don't know how many times I had this dream but I believe it was nightly for years. From the time I was three or four until around my eighth year. A habit of mine in my younger days was to rock myself to sleep on all fours. Not so unusual except that I would rock so hard that I would bang my head into the wall over and over, eventually creating a permanent indentation in the drywall and cracking two of my wooden crib headboards. I think this was my three and four year old way of trying to knock this dream out of my head.

It occurs to me that maybe I'm the guy on the other side of the river now, older, marginally wiser, trying to tell my younger self something important but I'm not sure what it is.

Is it about relationships? Is it that it's OK to be alone as long as you aren't lonely but it's better if you can find someone to share your day (and your bed) with? That compromises have to be made in order to keep those tenuous but essential “love connections” vital and that sometimes those compromises can be more than you should allow? Is it about organized religion and the pernicious tendency to fall into mob mentality? Is it about voting with your brain and not your emotional response or that making art with the primary goal of making money is an empty and sad pursuit? Is it that I need to tell myself that Death is an inevitability but Fear of the Inevitable is a monumental waste of the few seconds granted in between womb and tomb? That time with your family is like water to a seed? That looking at pretty women is absolutely acceptable and that tits are shaped that way to attract your attention and that, as long as you understand that women are not objects but living, breathing people (who tend to make you stupid and preverbal) then wanting (and having) sex is perfectly normal? That drugs are excellent unless you give the drugs the keys to your self control but that, once in a while, losing your self control is a part of living as long you do no harm to anyone else? That guilt is a method of control more than a moral imperative? Am I supposed to yell across the river "You will fail far more than you succeed, but that's good because the failures make the successes taste better!"

Is the unknown mystery man on the other side of the river just trying to tell me that scars mean you're still alive and the more scars, the more life you had?

As I reflect upon my reflection, I understand at least one thing that makes sense—it's all about change and change and change.

A friend who taught a course at UIC had his students try to write down where they'd be, who they'd be in five years. He gave them fifty words to clarify this answer. I can do it in five words (which is amazing because I can't tell you how the weather is in less than 25).

Where will I be, who will I be in five years?

Considering who I was five years ago—living in Chicago, thinking about the grand possibilities of Vegas, in a thriving marriage—and who I am right now, at this very moment—

Five words.

I.
Have.
No.
Fucking.
Idea.

Four more words?

I’m good with that.