These Dreams

Note: This is a piece about some of my memories. If you're reading this on a device connected to the Internet, you can listen to the songs that have attached themselves to these memories in my mind. 

Please start with the song from which I plucked this title, These Dreams, by Ann and Nancy Wilson of Heart. This version, performed live.

The sky turned green that night in 1986 at 8 o'clock.  I saw it over the trees while I snatched the dried sheets off the clothes line, putting the wooden pins in my overall pockets. Quickly, but carefully; you didn't "lose" items in our house.

A few minutes earlier the dissonant emergency warning tone interrupted the Brady Bunch on the television set.  I didn't need to read the scrolling warning; you could feel what was happening. Hot, wet air. The birds weren't moving. No leaves quivered in the breeze because there wasn't one.

It was wrong.

I rushed outside to get the laundry—if it got wet again I'd have to answer for it.

The wind nearly ripped the screen door out of my hand as I tried to push through the back door into the kitchen. The light outside through the picture window in the foyer dimmed, then it brightened again.

I ran. Up the stairs to my sister Jesse's room to pull her by the hand. My brother Curt was in bed at the small room at the other end of the tall, narrow hall.

"Come on, get up. Now. No time," I said as I tried to shake him awake. No time. I picked him up and carried him down the stairs while I dragged my sister behind me.

CRACK! Lightning struck so close I heard the sound of the whip at the same time the flash blinded me through the window on the stair landing.

We have to move. 

The pressure changed, the wind switched directions. The windows breathed in, then out, in, then out against their frames.  I lost my nerve there on the floor of the foyer, holding my brother and sister against me as I pulled the phone receiver on the long yellow cord from the kitchen over to our spot.

"Grandma I'm scared," I said, crying. She soothed me and talked to me. I don't remember what she said before the line went dead.

And then, the deluge. Outside the picture window the two trees in the front yard bent horizontal from the wind's force. To the right, then to the left. One of our dead cars (I think it was the 1976 Monte Carlo) in the driveway rocked on its suspension.

I'd never seen—or heard—anything like this.

But it wasn't too loud to hear a piece of the roof come off.

I screamed. Jesse and Curt screamed. The cellar door was only 15 feet behind us. I knew I had to get us there, but I couldn't move. And while I couldn't move I knew I was failing my brother and sister because I was too much of a coward to do my duty and protect them.

Mother got home about an hour later. She'd been at night school at the community college 20 miles away. As she tried to get home, cops stopped her on most roads if downed trees didn't do it first. Cortland was closed. 

The meteorologists said it was a freak storm with "straight line winds." But it was a tornado. Straight line winds don't usually cut a serpentine path through a forest of trees, skipping one spot, then starting a new winding path a few yards away, as the damage in the woods around the waterworks showed. Television news showed pictures of mangled airplanes with their wings twisted like bendy straws at the municipal airport.

"You were hysterical and I couldn't get you to answer me; it was like you weren't there," mother said later. "I almost gave you a Valium."

I don't know why she didn't. 

But I know why tornadoes have never left my dreams in all these years. It's because I never saw the funnel. I never saw the storm face to face for what it was. That tornado and I had business that's still unfinished.

There's unfinished business with my brother and sister, too. I couldn't make the final 15 feet. Yes, I know. It all turned out OK. But it nearly didn't.

I haven't forgiven myself. 

'Every second of the night I live another life'

There have been too many tornado dreams to count. I could only guess that it's in the hundreds. Sometimes they're terrifying with a mile wide-monster staring me right in the face while every shelter that was behind me a moment ago vanishes.  Others are almost artistic. Multiple vortices writhe around each other, like nimble elephant trunks captured in slow motion. 

They're always almost there. In another moment, they'll be upon me. Sometimes I make it to the cellar, sometimes I don't. But it doesn't matter. Like every erotic dream I can remember, nothing is consummated. I wake before le petit mort, and before the grand one. 

Dreams have plagued me since I was old enough to form memories. Because they've always been nightmares. The first one I remember was of the parallel, zig-zag lines of electric light in the woods of Tully, New York across from the farmhouse we rented when I was five years old. They made a noise. The descending perfect fourth you hear on European ambulances. AH-nah, AH-nah, AH-nah.

It's a terrible sound. A few years later I heard it—AH-nah, AH-nah, AH-nah—on an episode of Scooby Doo featuring a mad doctor stealing gold by disguising it as a patient on a stretcher. A dead patient, with the sheet pulled all the way up.

It so scared me that I ran to tell my mother.

"You got scared of something you saw on Scooby Doo?", my mother said, drawing on her Merit Ultra Light 100. "Jesus Christ, Josh."

The nightmares really took off in my teen years. I suspect it had a lot to do with the anti-depressants I started taking then; this class of drugs is known to produce vivid dreams. But adolescence is hard for any child, let alone one living in a prison guarded by a disturbed warden wearing a maternal mask. 

"Vivid" isn't nearly enough to describe what my dream world was like for almost 30 years. They were hyper-realistic.  Like a Viewmaster with a stereoscopic image so three-dimensional it's a caricature of the world.

They had a cinematic look, too. I used to describe the saturated hues as "Technicolor," but that's not right. The colors were the palate and saturation of Fuji 50-speed Velvia slide film. But the sharpness of the image was Kodachrome 25, as if the world's finest knife sliced infinitely sharp edges into the world. 

I'm going to borrow from Stephen King.  In sleep, I went to the territories, a parallel  world almost, but not quite, this one. King described this place in the boy's adventure tale The Talisman, about young Jack Sawyer who trekked through the territories to save his dying mother. 

There were familiar places in the territories; regular stops I found myself at. The catacombs of the dead that only I could find by pulling the correct vine in the thicket to open the concealed door. The back room of the mortuary where I had to receive the corpses of children that came in every day on the train. The mothers and fathers were counting on me to keep and preserve them, not to allow them to rot away. 

Or the empty towns that looked like the places I've lived, without the human population. Only the animals were there. Abandoned cats, dogs, rabbits, wandering the streets looking for their supper and their home. They all came to me. I could never keep them all alive no matter how fast I worked to feed them. 

These are not the kind of dreams it is easy to wake up from. They color the mood long into the day; sometimes they haunt for days.  At their worst, they confused me about what was real and what I had dreamt. 

I'm glad they're gone. Mostly. Like the tornadoes that still terrorize and fascinate me, the dreams were compelling. But they were as dark as they were thrilling, and I have had enough.

What they all were, these dreams, were unfinished business. At 47, I am 6 years into a fundamental change in my life. To save my health and my mind, I had to "divorce" my mother. 

She also lived in the territories. One night she would be my literal jailer with a set of keys on her hips. On others she would invite me to a party in order to surprise me by humiliating me in front of the guests. Sometimes she called my alma mater and had them rescind my diploma as I was taken back into the custody of the care home she dumped me in as a young teen. Or, she would stand up during a speech I was giving and tell the auditorium that I was wicked, had been that way since birth, and that everything I said was a lie. 

It's astonishing how many years I lived in this dream world without realizing what these dreams were telling me. My mother was my jailer. She did hurt me on purpose, for pleasure. She did try to take what was mine and annihilate my reputation.

My unconscious knew all along what my waking mind could not tolerate. 

'Ground control to Major Tom'

Listen here:

At twilight in 1984 my family got out of the 1969 Dodge Dart in a strip mall parking lot somewhere in Anaheim. A red neon sign displaying VENICE PIZZA stayed lit although the shop lights were all off. The key in the ignition was turned to "on" so the radio would keep playing even though the engine was off. The red OIL light on the dash was the same color as the pizza sign. 

It was warm and still, that time at dusk when the colors are still saturated. The blue sky darkened but didn't fade; the palm trees were becoming silhouettes. Venus was out, I remember that.

Mother, me, Jesse, and Curt had gotten out of the car to watch a 747 flying way too low overhead. I remember what kind of plane it was because I'd never seen a four-engined jumbo jet in real life. They're big when they're close.

'Take your protein pills and put your helmet on' came out of the open car windows. 

Maybe I can conjure the scent for you. Chrysler vinyl interior (medium blue), old motor oil, and the faint smell of pre-emissions-standards exhaust that clung to the car. And the scent of Southern California cooling off at night. 

"My God, I hope he makes it," mother said, gripping the door jamb with her non-cigarette hand. 

It was so low. And so slow.

Do the people on board know what's happening? Will they see their families again?

'Tell my wife I love her very much
(she knows)'

Eventually it disappeared over the horizon. For a few minutes we waited without saying anything, looking for a fireball.

I don't know what happened to that flight. It  must have made it,  but I wouldn't know. In those days you had to wait for the 11:00 news, and that was past my bedtime.

Another story unconsummated, so it became part of the territories. I've been in dozens of plane crashes these 30 years. Sometimes I know in advance; the cabin crew tells us we're going down. They never give instructions because it's pointless. We're going to die, and that's all we need to know.

Sometimes only I know. I can see the engine fire out of my window but the call button won't work, and I can't yell loud enough for the stewardess to hear me. I've never saved a flight.

The engines on the right wing may fall off, canting the plane into the ground on its side. Other times a piece of the floor or wall falls out as we watch the ground get closer. 

Every time, I'd wake up before the crash. Except the last time, the last dream, which came in 2021. We crashed, and we died. Death was the world in freeze-frame. All that was left was the image of the moment and there would never be anything else. 

'But all that I remember are dreams in the mist'

I haven't been to the territories in my dreams for almost five years, except for the occasional breakthrough. The nightmares—all dreams—have simply stopped. If I have dreams, I don't remember them any longer. 

Plane crashes and tornadoes still compel me. I consume every video I can find about them. There isn't an episode of any forensic air crash documentary or dramatization I haven't watched. Videos of storm chasers can capture me for hours. I may go on a tornado chase one of these days. Flying lessons have occurred to me, too.

The Prozac-class of drugs had a lot to do with my dreams. But as my shrink points out, it's surely also because when I divorced my mother, I saw her face to face for who she was. A line from the 1945 film noir Mildred Pierce comes back to me.

'I think I'm really seeing you for the first time in my life, and you're cheap and horrible.'

I faced the devil and I dare to hope it was an exorcism.

But like the mental illness I have experienced, dreams can come back from the dead. At various periods I've been diagnosed and treated for Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Panic Disorder, and Major Depression. With occasional (but notable) rough spells, these have been in pretty firm remission for years. 

They're never truly gone. Under great stress, the OCD comes back. I'm counting cracks in the ceiling to make sure they "don't get any worse." Or my Tourette's-like vocal and breathing tics reassert themselves. 

In the same way, the dreams come back. But I know what they are now, I know what they're telling me. My conscious mind and my unconscious finally talk to each other. 

A month ago, my cat died. The last stretch of 16 hours spanned a night of helplessly watching her seize and make spastic movements. There was nothing I could do to help her, and I would have died myself if it would have prevented her suffering. 

Two years ago, I went to the hardware store and bought a hatchet to do what had to be done to put a suffering dove out of her misery. A broken neck left her partially paralyzed and squirming on the ground. I didn't think I could do it, but I did, and I'm glad. Yes, it was awful. It was also right.

I thought about it with Lily cat, but I couldn't. I don't know if I did right or wrong. 

So I did it in the territories this week. As soon as I killed Lily and stopped her suffering,  there was my mother, standing next to me in her sloppy, thrift-store skirt and dirty T-shirt without a bra.

"Now look what you've done," she said. 

From inside her neck another "Lily" emerged, flexing in pain. The more I tried to kill her the more Lilys emerged, and none of them had mouths. They couldn't scream.

So I did as I woke up trying to figure out where I was.

I have unfinished business.