When I dream about my father I usually wake up in an awful mood for reasons I don’t understand until an hour or two later. Today, for instance. I wish my wife could see the signs for me and let me know when it’s happening, but she has her own dead father to entertain. 

When I dream about my father he’s mute—he communicates with me via notes on scraps of paper. Did I bring this about? What sin of mine cost him his voice?

When I dream about my father he’s neither contrite nor guilty about the circumstances of his death but rather jovial, as if all the bad stuff happened too long ago to matter. Maybe the afterlife soothes temperaments like his, allowing those who died in spiritual agony to achieve the glowing self-acceptance they denied themselves on earth. 

When I dream about my father, he’s often living on a big houseboat that I come to visit. My mom is nowhere to be seen, replaced by some faceless woman who’s chasing around a bunch of kids—my half-siblings, I guess. My dad is as old as he was when he died, which is younger than I am right now. This incongruity spooks me beyond words. 

When I dream about my father I wake up worrying that I’m subject to the same insane fate—a worry that once consumed my waking hours as well as my dreamtime. If this is true, then I’m behind the curve and have some catching up to do. I’m eight years older than he ever was, and I still haven’t lost my shit. What’s taking me so long? If I manage to keep it together, am I somehow dishonoring him?

When I dream about my father it’s as if the empty space in my life caused by his absence takes a deep breath, fills like a balloon, and squishes the organs that surround it: spleen, lungs, intestines, liver. Then everything goes back to normal, and that balloon hangs in my viscera like a hollow pinkie.

When I dream about my father I hear his voice in my own upon waking, though I didn’t hear it in the dream because he’s mute. A resonant voice— growly, always pissed off at something. I want to destroy that voice more than anything in the world. 

When I dream about my father I wish I could call him up and chat about meaningless bullshit like football. How his Steelers are doing, or how my Broncos are doing. What powermongering tricks the right-wing nut-jobs are up to behind our backs now.  I’ll try calling him this week. Really, I will. I’ll get my fingers ready, dial a random number that the Muse picks for me. If this happens to be your number, feel free to say you don’t know me. Or talk to me, really talk to me, about the dead that you still dream of.

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from Thirty-One Octets: Incantations and Meditations (WordTech Communications/CW Books, 2014).