a dream

August 3, 2002

I’d been up and used the bathroom. Read one of James Thurber’s off-the-wall stories. I think it was the one where a cop happens upon a man crawling on his hands and knees barking, while his wife slowly drives their car toward him. They are debating whether human’s eyes glow in the dark like cats, dogs and deer. The wife is convinced that it’s the level of the light in their eyes, not the nature of the eyes themselves. Their experiment and the cop’s knowledge on the subject doesn’t convince her as the couple drives home.

I crawled back under the sheet without much hope of falling back to sleep. But it was 5:15 am on a Saturday morning and the intense heat of the previous week was still hours away after the thunderstorms the night before. The ceiling fan moved the cool air gently over us.

I must have slept.

My brother and I are on our bicycles. Apparently we had been on one of our lengthy treks. Having accomplished our mission (in the dream I believe I knew what that mission was, but can’t recall now).  I’m carrying a heavy bag or backpack (perhaps we’d been to some distant store). We are on our way back home, coasting down a gradual slope through a residential neighborhood with large, well-manicured lawns and curving streets. The path we ride on is not near the street. A well-trod foot path. In reality, I know of no such place in and around our home town.

We are picking up speed. Me on the ten-speed I’d saved for and bought at the Western Auto in town the year before. Not the town where we lived (there were no such stores there), but the bigger, “real” town ten miles away where the high school was. My brother is on the little banana-seat he’s had since he was five. His first bike. But he didn’t really grow till high school so it’s fine for him now (he’s barely five feet tall), though he has to pedal several times faster than me to keep up.

On this downhill slope he is ahead of me on the pathway. Speed here determined by gravity and daring, more than the mechanics of the bike and leg strength. It occurs to me that we could make another stop, while we’re in the area. Not sure what, but thinking that we can do something else before making the long trek home. The heavy bag is pulling down steadily on my left shoulder.

My brother has moved quite a bit ahead of me around a curve so I put on some speed to catch up. As I see him, still twenty-yards ahead, I shout, “Wait up. Maybe we can do something…” and give up. He doesn’t stop. He doesn’t turn around. And I am — suddenly — not on my bicycle. I’m running and the bag over my shoulder is dragging me down. As in dreams, the fact that my bicycle is no longer beneath me isn’t all that disconcerting. But I do want to get it back. So I turn and start sprinting back up the path. Searching for it. Wishing my brother would stop to watch the heavy bag while I go back for my bike.

Around the second or third curve there are people grouped together off to the side of the path. We had passed people out walking and sitting on benches, but this was a more concentrated grouping. More purposeful. As I get closer, I see that they are standing over a UPS guy, slumped on the grass, leaning against a tree. He is rubbing his shoulder painfully. He was hurt somehow. I’m in pain myself, a stitch in my side, adding to the increasing pain in my shoulder. My lungs wheezing for air.

The group of observers points, without actually pointing, past the tree where, I’m relieved to see, my ten-speed is upended in a bush. The front wheel is still spinning and it has no serious damage. My relief is such that my sore shoulder and side instantly stop throbbing. Then I feel nothing at all as I see myself, under the next bush, obviously dead.

Waking up it was 8:35 and I was alone in the bed – out of breath. The ceiling fan stirring the cool air.