This post is a bit tardy. Father’s Day was a day of being more conscious of my own fatherhood rather than that of my father.
My father passed away in 1991. Shortly following his death, I had two very brief, clear, distinct dreams.
The first dream was at some sort of beach, or seaside. Dad was in the water up to his waist with his back to the shore. He was standing exactly where the sun was hitting the water, and the brilliant glitter reflected off the small waves blinded me to the point of his being nearly invisible. Fifty yards, or so, separated us.
I called out to him, and he turned his head slightly to the right seemingly having heard something. My voice, for some reason, wasn’t audible to me, as though calling out in a wind storm. That was the extent of that dream.
In the second dream I was walking down some unrecognizable hallway. As I walked past an open door, I saw my father sitting in a straight chair by a window. Wearing a white shirt, no tie, sleeves rolled up a couple of turns, and khaki slacks, he appeared to be in his early 30s with black hair and a mustache. He had his legs crossed. A cigarette hung from his fingers as he looked toward the door.
“Are you okay?” I asked. “Yes,” was his reply.
And that was that dream. I am sure Dad has been somewhere in hundreds of dreams over the past 22 years, but only these two survived into the daylight and my memory.
It is more than a bit interesting that the second dream found my father free from his paralyzing disease and massive stroke that rendered him speechless the last six months of his life. Gone were the ravages of career disappointments, shattered hopes and dreams, the end of flying airplanes, the debilitating effects of alcohol.
He was restored to a state of being that I would have seen at the age of three or four. An amazing and easily recallable image. In that dream, all had been erased back to Dad’s young fatherhood and the beginning of his career.
In a dim light... 