I dream of my father.
It sneaks up on me in my sleep, this dream I have from time to time.
Maybe more than time to time. I think I have it every night, but most nights I sleep through and wake up in the morning having forgotten.
Some nights I’m not so lucky.
Tonight for instance.
My father is there with me one minute, the next minute gone, disappeared into the darkness. He’s never dead in the dream. He’s missing, which is much worse. At least with dead, you know what you’re getting. But what is missing? Missing means he could be lost and need help. He could be hurt. He might have run away, abandoned me, Mom, and Josh. He might have been taken against his will.
If he’s missing, he can still be found.
That’s what’s so painful about the dream. When I’m awake, I know my father is dead. He died in a car accident two years ago. A little less than two years. But in the dream, I don’t know that. In the dream he’s alive and I’m looking for him, searching everywhere with this giant wave of fear expanding in my chest.
Some nights I sleep through until morning, but not tonight. Tonight I’m in the middle of the dream when my eyes pop open. I reach for the big Maglite flashlight I keep in bed with me, but it’s rolled away onto the floor somewhere. There’s nothing to do but lie here with the covers pulled up high, remembering everything.
I don’t know when I go back to sleep, or if I do. I spend the rest of the night in that place between sleep and dreams and waking, my room barely illuminated by my night-light, lying in bed with my eyes open, staring at nothing at all.
Not true. Staring at the rest of my life.
How does it help to think about your entire life when it’s three in the morning? What are you supposed to figure out at a time like that? And when you’re sixteen like me, the rest of your life is a long, long time.
Or a very short one.
You never know. Which is just something else to think about.
“Adam!” my mother shouts.
My mother is not a dream. That much I’m sure about.
“You’re going to be late for school!” she says from the foot of the stairs.
It’s morning already. My mother is extremely nervous in the morning. She’s super nervous at night. In between she’s only relatively nervous.
“Are you awake?” she says more quietly from the other side of my door.
“For a long time,” I say through the closed door.
“I had trouble sleeping, too,” she says.
“Why?”
“Bad dreams,” she says.
I don’t respond. I wait until I hear her footsteps moving away, and then I drag myself out of bed.
I turn off my night-light and crack open the shades. The sun is harsh, tinged with yellow, hinting at the summer to come.
That’s when I remember. It’s the first day of tech. We move into the theater this afternoon. Our spring production opens in four days. A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
I should be excited. I search my mind, trying to find some angle that equals excited.
“Adam!” my mother calls, now down in the kitchen. “Look at the time!”
Excited doesn’t come. I’ll have to settle for awake.