A break from politics and social issues. Couldn’t you use a break?
“Your recruitment is all done, everything in order, except we have this matter of the incident with the police. All three of the Damian brothers were arrested…”
”But I wasn’t arrested. Look, LeQuay was my friend at the time. He saw me outside my apartment and asked me to come along with them: they were going to confront his former landlord. How was I to know he’d go nuts, start screaming and throwing things?”
”Yes, I can see that.”
”So I’m not being accepted?”
”No… welcome to the Air Force!”
He shook my hand and I limped out the door of the recruitment office wondering what I was doing going into the Air Force when I could hardly walk.
Unlike my previous musings regarding dreams 99% of this is simply recycled moments in life. My life in turmoil, emotionally a wreck, I almost join the Navy just before Nam ended because 5 guys I’d become friends with at a dance place called Four Acres were joining, only to be told I had to lose 50 pounds first. I figured they must not need me that bad. My left foot no longer serves me well: after slipping under a lawnmower in my early teens, having a tong for a heavy boat drop on it four years ago and then a Honda Ruckus due to very soft sand. After the second operation it doth not serve stability or even just standing very well. I had a friend named Damian LeQuay in college and another friend of mine once picked me up and told me he was angry at one of his grandmothers. He drove there, started pounding on her door and screaming at her. Then he walked off down the road, leaving me to confront the police and a car I legally wasn’t supposed to drive due to insurance concerns. The cop told me to get in and drive away despite that. I did.
Except one small thing: the incident in the apartment with the Damians actually happened: that one small thing being it was another dream. And in this second dream I remembered the previous dream in perfect detail. If I had had the dream the night before, OK. But I had had that dream well over two years ago.
My first commentary about dreams was about the linear nature of them. I used to have a dream about a non-existent magic store in Douglasville, Georgia, that would return after many years, again and again. I would go into the store that I knew by heart and speak with the proprietor I had become friends with. I would ask about whether what I had ordered had come in yet, or what I needed that I forgot to get last time. She aged along with the dream. In the last magic store dream she asked me to write about her. I did, and never had the magic store dream again.
But the detail! Just like the layout of the magic store the confrontation with the landlord was in a hall that was exactly the same as it had been the first time. The old Chicago Market plaza in Utica was exactly like it had been when I was there in the 70s, except with a recruiter’s office. The real recruiter’s office was elsewhere and it was Navy. As I left I limped back I turned towards Dudley: a street where one of my old apartments was. The Damian brothers were just like they were in the original dream: three slight variations on Damian LeQuay, only each aged as if they were baby brother to oldest. And somehow the mix of today and several yesterdays made perfect sense. My brain fine tuned them into a distinct narrative and remembered an old dream inside another dream without missing a single thing. It’s enough to even make an Inception fan scratch his head, for my dreams aren’t simply different, improbable, tales with familiar characters. They are interconnected, seamless, sewn together better than the most talented seamstress could achieve; as accessible as any part of my partial eidetic memory: perhaps more so.
How can I remember something so exactly I had forgotten, but only when I’m dreaming? Is there some actual dream world? If so it must be quite bizarre and not as beholden to the laws of physics, biology and other scientific disciplines as the waking world is. If so might it be possible someday for the real us to visit that world, that dimension, that plane of existence?
I more than have my doubts. But tis fun to speculate, to muse, to wonder at it all.
-30-
Inspection is a column that has been written by Ken Carman for over 40 years. Inspection is dedicated to looking at odd angles, under all the rocks, and into the unseen cracks and crevasses that constitute the issues and philosophical constructs of our day: places few think, or even dare, to venture.
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