Friday Night Dream

It's weird, well I think it's weird, how in dreams weird things can happen yet are treated as normal. In last night's dream (early this morning's, to be truthful), I had a conversation with a dead man.

Troy and I are in a lakeside guesthouse. I guess we are staying there? We're in a hallway, he is standing in front of me and I am sitting on an end-table, pushed against the wall. He is telling me about his cancer...his conversations with the doctors, the tests that were done, his prognoses.

His mother and sister are there with us as well. They've heard all of this before, but still they listen. Intensely, carefully. Troy seems uncomfortable with them there.

I ignore his mother and sister and listen and watch only Troy. Suddenly he pauses and is still. He sweeps his eyes (but not his head) to his left, to check the location of his mother and sister. They are to his left and a little behind him, so they cannot see where he is looking. He has come to an important part of his story and I can tell he does not want to share this part with them.

Just as suddenly he turns to them and politely, but firmly, asks them to excuse us. They turn and walk away. I slide off the end-table and lead the two of us down the hall and outside.

We are in the backyard of the house, facing the lake. It's a smallish yard, and I get glimpses of the lake through the clot of trees that seem to border the far side. I run ahead barefoot because I want to feel the grass on my feet. I do a little run-hop and my left foot skids in a small patch of mud. I recover my balance and bend down to make sure it is mud and not dog doo. It's mud.

Troy sits down in a deck chair and a small fire pit alights in front of him. I come over and crouch down, facing him. I look up at him and he doesn't look like Troy, of course. He looks the adult version of a cross between Lance Kerwin and Jimmy McNichol. With the 1970's hair. But it is Troy.

He looks very serious. He says he is about to tell me an extremely important question the doctors ask him and the extremely important answer he gave them. I gain the impression it somehow has to do with the two of us, although I may only be peripheral to the answer.

And this is where I wake up. In that hazy plain, where the minds travels from dreaming to waking, my mind formulates various possibilities of what that 'extremely important' exchange actually was.

But in becoming completely awake, my mind (or my heart) has decided to guard that secret for itself. I can no longer remember what those possible exchanges were. Only faint echoes whisper, out of range.