To be read to this tune.
Side note before I begin. I used to come up with stupid gimmicks for karaoke nights. One time I dressed as Dean Stockwell in Blue Velvet doing this song, complete with white makeup that for some silly reason stopped at the jawline and didn't continue to the collar, but I was serenading a cardboard stand up of Freddy from Nightmare on Elm Street 5 that my friend Jesse gave me. It went over well, I think. The point was to be entertaining, not to be good.
Anyway, I've been having a lot of dreams lately in which I die in horrible ways. I'm not talking about coming within an inch of dying and then jumping awake with a start. I mean I die in these dreams, and I'm dead for at least a minute before I wake up. If I were superstitious I'd think I was being told something.
To quote Megadeth, I ain't superstitious. Well, not much. Long time readers of these columns may be aware that my grandfather on my mother's side had a lot to do with how I was brought up. He was superstitious as hell. If a black cat threatened to cross his path, and he was driving a car, he would do his best to run it over before it had the chance. He never got one. I think it was just for show, him trying to scare them away, because I remember how he nearly lost it when he accidentally ran his lawnmower over a rabbit hole with grim results. He never walked under ladders (which is actually common sense, as anyone on a ladder was probably repairing something and could drop their tools accidentally at any moment). When my grandmother broke a mirror accidentally, he'd be despondent for days, thinking she would die at any moment over the course of the next seven years.
None of that translated to me. There is one, though, that almost gets me. He was deathly afraid of the number 13. Sometimes, irrationally, it makes me nervous. For most of my life, if I was reading a book, I would not put the bookmark in on page 13 or chapter 13. To be safe, I would wait until page or chapter 15. I've always known that this is irrational, but it was browbeaten into my head by Gramps since I was capable of speaking.
I've more or less broken myself of this stupid fucking habit. When I'm drinking something, I'll swallow by fours or fives so I'll never be left on sip 13. But it's ridiculous, and I recognize that fact. I've beaten this weird superstition, more or less. Every once in a while I'll catch myself avoiding 13, and I'll metaphorically slap myself in the face. But more or less, I've beaten it.
So when I say that I'm not superstitious, I'm 99% certain I'm not.
All in all, what I mean to say is that I doubt there is any force out there trying to send me messages in my dreams. Feel free to point and laugh if I die in the next few days. But I doubt that will happen.
These dreams (or nightmares, even though they are rarely scary) happen maybe twice a week. I'll give you three examples.
Example 1: I'm having a conversation with a friend, and something detonates in the distance. We both look to see what looks, at first, like a brand new sun rising from the earth. And it keeps getting closer and closer until it hits us both, vaporizing us. But I'm still asleep, and I think . . . I'll get to that in a moment.
Example 2: I'm in a taxi going somewhere in the City of Chicago proper. And a laser beam comes down from space and cuts through the road I'm on. The cabbie screams, and I see the laser approach, and I have no way to escape. The laser hits the car first and then me. Everything goes dark, but I'm still asleep, and I think . . . we're almost there.
Example 3: This is from last night. My car breaks down in a town I'm unfamiliar with, and we're hit with a rainstorm with a flood warning. I can't find the mechanic who is working on my car, but I've been hanging out with his kid. This rain is so hard that he suggests we hide out on his school bus. We do this, him in the seat in front of me as we watch the storm get worse. I see a new river running through town, and then comes the massive wave that is taller than most skyscrapers coming at us. It crashes down. I try to put my back against it while protecting the kid, but we both die from the sheer force of the wave. But I'm still asleep, and I think . . .
I think that I'm dead. I don't panic. I know that I owe the universe a death merely by being alive. But all I know is darkness. I'm still conscious, but there is nothing to be conscious of. I can't help but think, is this it? Since my sentience is still alive, I can't help but wait for some kind of afterlife to kick in.
But it never does.
I don't jump awake like when you fall off a cliff and wake up before your body gets destroyed on the rocks below. But my process of waking up is kind of difficult. It feels like I have to wrench myself back to reality. It's a slow process, like maybe I actually did die in my sleep and had to fight for life. I never feel right when I wake up from dreams like this.
I'm sure many of you have opinions about what this means. I ask kindly and politely for you to keep these to yourself. I think I know what they mean. I've been thinking about my own death a lot. When you hit your forties, it's inevitable. That's my theory, anyway.
I think I'm mentally preparing for when the actual day comes. I'm not afraid of death. I used to be afraid of how I'd die, but not anymore. You just can't fear something that will absolutely happen to you someday. You can only accept it and make the most of the time you have. So that's my approach. Never fear the things you don't have control over.
