A sick man's dreams

Now that I've become one of those middle-aged guys who can't make it through the night without a piss break, my dreams are often broken into double features (b. p. b. and a. p. b.). Last night's was a doozy. The first feature included one character after another making lengthy speeches about such things as "The World Food Bank." It was one of those dreams so infuriatingly boring that I'm convinced my waking up was a physiological response to the mental tedium. Upon awakening, I knew exactly what had inspired the dream. Before going to sleep I had listened to an audience recording of a Bruce Springsteen show from his last tour and had become irritated with the loudmouth fans who insisted on talking through most of the songs. Also, it occurred to me that Bruce's political speech before one of his songs was a little condescending (of course he's entitled to his views, but his having to spell things out for his audience with a speech seemed a bit much. Are we too stupid to interpret the songs for ourselves?). Clearly, these minor irritations played a part in the overly chatty and tiresome nature of the dream.

The second feature was a whole other story.

Earlier in the evening I had been thinking about a boy, a friend from my neighborhood when I was 8 years old, who was hit by a car while riding his bicycle, lingered in a coma for several years, and then died. I hadn't thought of him in quite a while and I'm still not sure what made me think of him last night. During the years that he was in a coma, volunteers from the neighborhood had pitched in to help the family with his therapy. My mother asked me to attend one of these sessions with her (it was probably at least a year after the accident). I only went with her once, but for obvious reasons there were certain things about the visit that I have never forgotten. I can still remember the gray light that suffused every room in the house and the hushed voices that the adults spoke in as we were led upstairs to Joseph's bedroom. Joseph, in pajamas, lay in what appeared to me at the time to be an oversized crib (really a hospital bed with sides that could be raised or lowered so he wouldn't fall out). We were encouraged to talk to him to keep his senses stimulated while we raised and lowered his arms and legs and rolled him from side to side on the bed. I remember my mother talking to him continually, but I don't remember saying anything myself (I was probably too mortified by Joseph's physical appearance; he was very thin and he wore a pained and baffled expression on his face as we manipulated his limbs). Naturally, I couldn't wait to get out of there and probably said as much to my mother after we left (this was most likely the reason I never returned). Tied to these memories is the memory of the look on the face of the classmate whose father's car had struck Joseph when another classmate taunted him about it. I don't think I was aware of that fact until that moment and I'll never forget the pained and baffled expression on that boy's face either. Because these boys had to endure these painful experiences at such an early age, they have been forever linked in my mind.

Perhaps because my memory of Joseph's emaciated body reminded me of the concentration camp victims I had seen in films about the Holocaust, the second dream had a Nazi theme. I was in a small farmhouse with stacks of dead Nazi corpses in a bin in the backyard. I had been instructed to start digging graves on the side of the house. As I began to furiously dig several graves at once, a family of corpses rose up from the pile. They weren't dead yet even though their skulls were beginning to poke through their faces! I say a "family" because it was obvious the animated corpses were a man and a woman and two kids. They began to lay down in the barely dug graves. Shocked, I asked them what they were doing. The father spoke for them all, "Why look to the future when the end is so near?"