Weird Dream

It started out at a wedding. I thought it was a little weird, but then I thought it was REALLY weird when I discovered I was the one getting married (and that my grandpa was there, since he died in 1991). The girl I was getting married to was a chick that I run into (not literally) once in a while when I’m working, because she works at a place that I occasionally pick up freight from.

So here I am at my wedding getting married (now that I think about it, that sentence seems stupid. What else do people do at their weddings?). We were having the wedding outdoors in this park by a stream. It wasn’t a religious wedding, so I suppose me and her had similar views on that (I’ve always thought that it’s stupid how people who never go to church, or go so rarely that you could write “Damnation” in the dust on the seat where they sit, still want to get married at a church and make “vows before God” when their whole lifestyle is evidence that they really don’t care about God at all).

The wedding was actually pretty cool. Then we had the reception, and low and behold a ton of my friends from high school (that I haven’t seen since I went MIA to drug treatment a month before graduation) showed up.

That was a killer reception.

Then time jumped ahead a year or so and we were building our first house. We spent hours sitting in the living room of our apartment, drinking hot chocolate (it was winter), and looking at floor plans. We spent just as much time driving around looking at lots that we could possibly build on. The lot that we finally bought was found during a snowball fight.

We were out in the snow looking at the next lot over and she decided to start something. We had thought that the next lot over would be better, but there was no “For Sale” sign up there. As I was chasing her through the snow, I tripped over this piece of 4×4 that was buried in the snow. Attached to the piece of wood was a sign that said “For Sale,” and had the phone number of the realtor on it.

The sign had been knocked over by a snowplow.

We called the realtor the next day and set everything in motion to get our house going. It seemed like we were going over there every night after work to work on the house, since we wanted to do some of the building ourselves. Some nights we’d just stay there until early in the morning, then fall asleep together on rolls of uninstalled carpet for a few hours until we had to get up for work.

Then spring came and we got to doing the landscaping and stuff. She was a bit of a gardener, so the whole yard looked like something out of a landscaping magazine.

We didn’t have too many other friends to hang out with, but that was ok because we were totally content just being together. We didn’t really go out too much though because we were kind of strapped financially for a while. But any time we did go somewhere it was almost like we were Siamese twins that were attached at the hips.

One night after work in early summer, I was shopping and I splurged and bought a nice telescope, kind of like the one my dad built as a kid (see my “Good ‘Ol Grandpa entry if you didn’t hear about that). She loved to be outside at night and we used to spend hours laying in our hammock and watching the stars and looking for satellites and meteorites, so I figured she’d love to be able to see how much other cool stuff is out there.

At first though she was pretty hot that I had spent that much money without asking her. I did finally get her to calm down and I set the telescope up. I had stopped by my parent’s house before I got home so I could borrow this computer program that my dad has to find things in the sky. The very first thing I set it up for her to see was the Andromeda Galaxy. The Andromeda Galaxy was something I had seen many times as a kid and have always thought was cool. It’s the nearest galaxy to our own, and it looks like a cosmic octopus with its arms spiraling at millions of miles per hour, yet looking motionless because of how far away it is.

She took one look into they eyepiece and every ounce of hurt and anger was gone. She was hooked and eventually became a bit of an astronomy buff.

After that time skipped ahead a bit again. It seemed like just under a year because it was very early spring. I walked into the kitchen and saw that she was VERY pregnant. I reacted kind of funny because it honestly did seem like this was all really happening, even though I was living years worth of memories in the course of an hour or two while I was sleeping.

Then she grabbed my arm and kind of doubled over and said, “It’s time to go.” So I drove her to the hospital, trying to remember if I had been to any of those birthing classes. It turned out that it didn’t matter though, because my dream skipped the actual birthing process and jumped to the first time I got to hold my kid. I had a little girl named Andromeda Jane.

The next day I got to take my two girls home. We used to spend hours just sitting together holding Andy (our nickname for her). Thankfully, if Andy ever had any dirty diapers, I skipped those in my dream too.

Next on the tour of my imaginary future was a stop to Andy’s toddler years. She was walking all over the place and getting into everything. She was also starting to talk. She had mastered “Mama” and “Daddy” and “Me” (which is what she said when she wanted something).

Andy loved books and it seemed that one of us was constantly reading her stories. If you could get frequent flyer miles for going to the library, we would’ve had enough for five or six trips to Disney World.

A couple of years later, Andy was ready to get the training wheels off of her bike. She was absolutely certain that she could do it, so she wanted us both to be there, and so we were. Once again attached at the hip, we watched as Andy rode up and down the street, smiling so wide we joked that her lips might wrap around her head.

Then the distant feeling of reality grabbed me and threw me back into my bed.

I woke up and had to pee.

I didn’t get up right away though. I laid there and laid there and thought about what had happened. In a way it was almost like I couldn’t move. I missed that life. I missed “my” wife and “my” little girl. In a way it’s like I lost a family member. I dunno, this is really weird (hence the title).

God, I wish I had never woke up from that dream. Ever.

So to quote a phrase from my poem Exist,

”And yet as in life,

As in some cruel game

What I see in here

I cannot attain”

I don’t think that’s ever been more true than in this situation.