Dreams

For the first time in my life at age eighty  six I have sometimes waked in the morning from a dream which is so compelling that it take me time so situate myself into the reality of the darkened bedroom I sleep in here in Florida.  Previously I almost never dreamed except very occasionally in a cold fear of some imaginary pursuers in my desperate flight from -- what?  Now--must have been the heart surgery-- at least once a week I arise in a fantasy that seems to cling to me as a kind of cloud--like a movie set as I walk through the door to the espresso machine, the touch of which establishes my reality.  The dreams are all of a piece, portraying me as a boy of ten or eleven, sometimes when they are a little edgy I wake in flight from some unidentifiable menace but since the scene is a classroom of the sort one remembers from schools sixty or so years ago, I suppose I am dramatizing schoolhouse fears of my youth.  But I am quite clear on that; having already spilled the beans that I was attracted to other boys (I can't quite describe that with the dignified "I had identified myself" mainly because it was by groping that I committed to self advertisement.) the source of fear was something else.  More frequently I awake running, or moving fast, and then I am standing by my bed, trying to slow down.  This morning I was a newsboy, clearly of the turn of the nineteenth into the twentieth century, I felt the cap on my head, and the lace up shoes on my feet.  Happy go lucky newsboy, but rushed.  No time for breakfast I was late, had to get to the corner where the news company dropped the piles of papers, and as I opened the front door, the dream evaporated into eighty six year old me bending over to pick up The New York Times neatly rolled up and enclosed in blue plastic.  I like being this carefree boy, albeit today with pressing concerns.  Some days he and I are running--me experiencing it from within the body, he looking ahead at the road--and it is a street without traffic, not necessarily early in the morning, but a normal day at the height of the Great Depression when there were long stretches of time when no car passed on the streets.  The boy, the quiet, the serenity.  I shall not look at the paper this morning, cannot bear another word about the wars, the killings, the insecurities, the projections of the possibility of insanity in the White House before too many more months.  But I was never this newsboy, I rose at the ring of a bell and descended to breakfast with my siblings presided over by my mother and served by ah, to use the phrase "an elderly retainer."  From this vantage in time equally dream-like, since I am one of the very actors still above ground who performed in that real life drama .