My girlfriend April & I must’ve had a fight, or we were in another of our several periods when she’d put us on hold. Eventually she would call, to tell me she’d like us to date again, but a few weeks had passed and the phone hadn’t rung, so I called her. She was 19 or so but still lived at home, and this was in the landline era, so her father answered the phone. He told me to stop calling, and wuss that I am and always have been, I told him I wouldn’t call again.
Awakening, it took a few minutes for me to sort through and separate reality from the dream. I hadn’t called April, hadn’t spoken with her father. I don’t have her number, because we haven’t seen each other in 40 years.
Kooky dreams like this recur often, and almost always I awaken depressed, with a sadness deeper than the pit of my gut.
April was my first real love, and she sure made a lasting impact on my heart, damn it. Awake, I rarely think of her at all, but in dreams I’m still hoping she’ll call, and we’ll get together again. For 39½ years I’ve known that’ll never happen, but my dreams will never know.
Other nights, I dream of my late wife, the only person I’ve truly, deeply loved. In dreams she’s alive, and we’re happily together, sharing another of our many adventures, holding hands and giggling at our private jokes. When I awaken, she’s dead again, and again comes that monumental sadness.
Not just ladies, but everyone is invited to share my lifetime of regrets. There are dreams of dead friends and family, dreams of the living, and Schrödinger dreams of people years and years out of contact, so dead or alive there’s no knowing.
One dream or another, I wake with deep sadness nearly nightly, and can’t get back to sleep for hours, if at all. Haven’t had a good night’s sleep in decades, except on nights I take pills.
High school was fifty years ago, but still I dream about being bullied in the locker bay. I dream of shitty jobs and lousy co-workers dating back to the 1970s and ’80s. I’ve dreamed about people I’ve never met — Gilbert Gottfried, Bill Nye the Science Guy, and recently, Karoline Leavitt (don’t ask). I’ve dreamed of fictional characters, like Sulu from Star Trek, Kermit the Frog, and once, I dreamed myself into a noir with Robert Ryan.
Everyone and everything is rattling around in SleepyBooBooLand. Anyone could drop in at any time. That’s the nature of dreams, for me anyway, and I assume it’s the same for everyone.
This morning, thinking about people who’d popped into my dreams last night, here’s a thought that surprised me: You know who’s never visited me in a dream — not even once in my entire gosh darn life? God.
Even long ago when I was nominally a believer, I never dreamed that the Lord tapped my shoulder for a talking-to, or Jesus performed a miracle for me, or the Holy Ghost commanded me to do something.
This pure state of overnight godlessness startled me, then made me smile, then laugh. Same as my waking mind, my dreaming mind has no interest in religion. There is no God, whether awake or asleep, and I am seriously proud of my subconscious for understanding this.
11/25/2025
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