Dreams

I am fortunate to dream often and vividly, enough so that I sometimes confuse my dreams with reality. Some of my dreams have stuck with me for years, memories of things that never really happened, but my memories just the same.

Twice I have died in my dreams, so the myth that if you die in your dreams, you die in real life- is just that. A myth. I did not see the other end of death, just watched it come and that was it. 

Last night I dreamed I was snorkeling with my dad in Mexico. We were trying to dive for enough clams to have for dinner. The beach was crowded and good sized clams had already been taken up by many other swimmers. Not far from the shore, the bottom dropped off like a shelf into fairly deep water. I pointed it out to my dad, as there were many more clams down there. He somehow asked about how we get down there since it was so deep. I decided to demonstrate that we could do it, so I dove all the way down and touched the bottom, then turned to return to the surface. I could see his silhouette against the sparkling blue. I was almost out of air, my lungs burned and ached. As I rose to the surface, he started down to give it a try. I was running out of air, my lungs were going to explode.

I woke up.

I've had so many of these dreams in the last ten years, and I am very grateful for them. They feel real, and not out of the ordinary at all. I wake up with a very vivid memory of how it feels to have him by my side, even if we aren't doing anything special. In the ten years since he's been gone, we've worked on my car together, gone fishing, snorkeling, or just hung out around the house. And it feels a little empty when I wake up, but the dream always feels so real that it might as well have been an actual memory. And I'm grateful for the peaceful feeling I get when he's near in my dream, like little respites in the painful reality of his absence.

In those few waking moments before I let reality come back to me, I let the feelings play a little longer. In my mind we snorkeled a little longer, and it was just so great, the way it always had been.

I have snorkeled with my dad in Mexico, when I was a child. He pointed out a huge grouper and it scared the crap out of me because I had never seen a fish so large in my entire life. It was probably about my size at the time. He pointed out a huge clam shell, then motioned for me to wait as he dove down to get it. For years he had it up on his shelf in his house. Each side of the shell was the size of my adult hand.

I have fished with my dad, I have worked on my car with my dad (always with "extra parts").

None of these dreams are so out there that they couldn't have, or never did happen. But they are different enough to be new, and always, I am my adult self in the dreams. They imprint new memories on me, and it feels kinda nice.

He is always the same age.