157/365 Nightmares, Dream, Milieu

Six years ago this week, my sister's friend, Jesse, was found dead between two houses just a few blocks from where she (my sister Bevin) was living. His throat was cut so deep it nicked his spine. Bevin and her roommate identified the body from a photograph. There are moments in a life that can be pointed to and said, definitively, this was the moment when nothing was ever the same. I have a few of those moments, although most change is gradual. But for Bevin and her friends, for a long long time, this was their moment.

"Yeah, the whole neighborhood's covered in luminal. It's like we're living in a Law and Order episode. And that's all we can manage to watch on TV. We have to show an ID to go down our street after class, to get home. Cops drive by all night long."

Bevin tells me they're all having nightmares. Jen: "It's like, I couldn't breathe, like someone was sitting on my chest." Jesse shows up in some of them. They've all grown completely terrified of the basement--it's an old house that's been added onto several times, and one basement room has a pile of dirt 4 feet tall. Bevin won't even show me when I come up a year later for the trial.

"He was standing in that doorway. And he told me it was going to be ok. He walked away. That was the last one I had."

I think back to that time and I think about dreams and nightmares. I think about our brains and why they work the way they do. Why do people dream about people who have died? Are we working out emotions and things left undone? Is it reassurance, like Bevin's last dream? Wish fulfillment? What do dreams want from us, anyway? Sometimes the world seems so clear, so obvious, and then something like this happens and your head gets mixed up in circumstances and primal emotions.

The Magi experienced a dream, the moment when they were grafted onto the People of God. It was a warning not to return to Herod. So they went home to their own country by another route. And I've had dreams that seem so clear, so very real. Some even on the edge of terrifyingly true to life. So when Jesse is in Bevin's head telling her it's going to be all right, is that just Bevin hoping it's true, or is there some sort of knowledge she's tapping into? Because even though it will never be all right, for two families and for dozens of friends and their families and ripples through the pond all the way up to me writing this blog entry, many things they worried about after his death were resolved: his killer was found and convicted, and even though he had to be retried, he was convicted a second time. Things were resolved, even if they were not made whole again.

I think about recurring dreams I have had about a church called St. Rose of Lima on a street in south St. Louis that does not exist but I swear I could drive you there if only this or that road didn't end or twisted differently. I can describe the interior and I know how it feels to stand inside and run my hand down the back of the pews. There were several months back before I had kids that St. Rose's showed up on a regular basis. Most of the time I had to find something inside or meet someone there. Sometimes I just walked along the dead-end street looking at the cars parked along the side. I have some ideas what this meant, but it freaks me out, more than a little, that it was always the same church, the same setting, and it's a place that doesn't exist. I worry that it does and one day I'll walk in and know it.

And I think about the typewriter dream, back before I got married. I was looking to get a copy of my grandparents' wedding album because I was getting married at the same church. But my (now ex-) aunt was a major roadblock. She claimed she didn't know where it was. "Maybe it's in the garage?" she suggested. I was so angry and frustrated. And then I had the dream: I walked into my grandmother's bedroom, and there was a typewriter on the bed. And it typed out a message all by itself: check under the stairs in the basement. And I went to the house (my aunt and uncle were living there after my grandparents died) and asked if maybe I could just check the basement? My uncle let me in, and there it was, in a black trash bag under the stairs.

Maybe it was just putting the pieces together, thinking about where things might be, where things could be stashed. Maybe it was freaky luck. Or maybe something rearranged in my head and the stress and frustration did, what exactly?

And I have a choice about how to think about these experiences: I can be terrified, I can be overly rational, or I can just live. For the most part, I've chosen the last one.