My Father's Unexplained Return
Dreamt of my dad last night. I guess it was the first real dream with me interacting with him. He just suddenly showed up again, and there was no explaination for his 10-month absence. Just showed up at the doorstep, looking cold and confused. Everyone in the family was too happy to see him alive again to ask a lot of questions. They were beaming at him and when I would ask my sister or my mom questions like, "Well where has he been?" or "What about the funeral...we saw him in the casket?", they would just wave the question off, marveling at him, never taking their eyes off him, and answer by saying, "Doesn't he look good?" And he did, I suppose. He was spry again; no shuffled cancer walk, no wince of pain. But he was really quiet and didn't seem to really remember us well. I finally got the courage to talk to him, and though he looked and sounded like my dad, he seemed like a different man. I asked him some pointed questions about what happened, but he was casual in his answers to the point of being aloof. My dad was formerly a very engaging, direct man, who never failed to look me in the eye when he spoke to me or listened to me.
This isn't the dream I was hoping for. It was likely influenced by a novel I've been reading (Bruce Wagner's I'll Let You Go
) about a boy in search of the schizophrenic father who abandoned his mother before he was born. I wanted the Obi Wan Kenobi dream, where the voice of my father would come to me and tell me things I would need to know.
Okay, now for something a little lighter. Before the above mentioned dream, I had another dream last night that I was a film producer of a certain pornographic niche--lit porn. Basically, we would take sex scenes from literary classics--D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, etc.--and we would film these very explicit sex scenes that were faithful to the source text and were edited with a voiceover of an actor reading the text. The dream, however, was without nudity and coitus, and instead consisted of a lot of research and phone calls. Still, not such a bad business idea. I could imagine the ad in the back of The New Yorker, or perhaps facing the short story in Playboy (do they still publish fiction at Playboy?).
"Where have you been?" I asked.I eventually just gave up on the unsatisfying interrogation and stood back away from him with my family and watched him.
"Oh, you know, around."
"No, I don't know. Where have you been?"
"Different places. Walking, mostly."
"Didn't you die?"
"No."
"What about the funeral?"
"That wasn't me."
"But I saw you in the casket!"
"It must have been someone else who looked like me."
"But then how did you leave the hospital?"
"I walked out."
"But what about your liver and all the pain you were having?"
"It went away. I got better."
This isn't the dream I was hoping for. It was likely influenced by a novel I've been reading (Bruce Wagner's I'll Let You Go
) about a boy in search of the schizophrenic father who abandoned his mother before he was born. I wanted the Obi Wan Kenobi dream, where the voice of my father would come to me and tell me things I would need to know. Okay, now for something a little lighter. Before the above mentioned dream, I had another dream last night that I was a film producer of a certain pornographic niche--lit porn. Basically, we would take sex scenes from literary classics--D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Henry Miller, etc.--and we would film these very explicit sex scenes that were faithful to the source text and were edited with a voiceover of an actor reading the text. The dream, however, was without nudity and coitus, and instead consisted of a lot of research and phone calls. Still, not such a bad business idea. I could imagine the ad in the back of The New Yorker, or perhaps facing the short story in Playboy (do they still publish fiction at Playboy?).
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