Person on the Page

In my dream, my father sits in his rocking chair on the screened-in porch at the house where we lived long ago when I was a child. My mind casts the scene in sepia–a time and place from my childhood recreated in yellowed tones, shades of brown deepening to gray. A scene composed of memories now faded. Almost colorless.

I’m telling him how much I loved playing on this porch during the summers during my childhood. I ask if he remembers how the sun shone through the screens in the afternoons, making the space bright and inviting.

I played school there. I was the teacher instructing invisible students seated in rows of imaginary desks. I was the housewife serving my neighbors a summer dinner of fried chicken and potato salad at a pretend dining table. I was the mommy, soothing the make-believe child who had fallen off her bike.

This place was important to me, I explain. I was happy there. As my father rocks, his profile moves in and out of shadow, barely visible. The porch is dark, except for a golden brightness hovering at its center. 

. . . . .

My husband and my dog burst through the bedroom door, and I am awake. The dog jumps on the bed and bumps her nose into mine. My husband tells me the sky was cloudless when he went outside to get the mail. It’s afternoon. I’ve been napping.  Through the window, the sun floods the room with light.

. . . . .

Unlike most dreams that are experienced, dismissed, and soon forgotten, this one calls to me. I close my eyes and try to return to it, hoping to go back to that scene on the porch with my father.  The lure of the dream is not so much the scene itself in its almost monochrome dimness.  It’s the feeling it elicited, the mood it exuded–the sensations of childhood. And his presence.

He’s been gone for decades.  Just after he died, I dreamed of him almost nightly–the sound of the garage door opening as it always did after his work day. His steps on the stairs as he entered the house. Those familiar sounds telling me that my belief that he was gone was a mistake, because here he was, home as usual.  His death was all a misunderstanding. 

Gradually, those dreams dissipated.  I learned to live without a father. 

Now all of these years later, in my dreams, he’s back.  Why?

I know what is assumed about dreams. They are simply a tool of the mind. No magic fuels them. They serve an adaptive purpose during the restorative hours of our rest. Neuroscientists tell us that they increase the brain’s plasticity and help to maintain its efficiency. They fine-tune our neurons as we sleep.  Psychologists associate dreams with the mind’s efforts at processing memories or problem-solving. They allow our unconscious to convey messages into our consciousness through a complex interplay of regions in the temporal lobe.

So, my dream can be explained simply as a physiological event. The brain doing its housekeeping. Its sensory details are irrelevant. It’s all just mind work. 

Yet, it still calls to me—this dream—inviting me to return to the scene–to the past, to the presence of someone long gone.

I wonder. Could dreams be more than just a mechanism of the mind?  Could they be something else, something more real? Could they be a means of communication between people separated by miles, by time, perhaps by death? Could they be a form of travel from one immaterial realm to another?

A product of the Western world and its science, I shy away from those thoughts.  But even Western science now nods to the possibility that a dream is in some sense something real.  Those who are visited by departed loved ones in dreams are in some way really visited. Or the dreamer somehow travels to a realm occupied by the dead, or to a transitory ground between life and death, to feel the presence of ones who have died. 

Could I have been such a traveler?  Was that scene from my childhood home a realm to which I journeyed to talk to my father? And when the dream was interrupted and I was awakened, was I called back from that place abruptly, before my father was able to say what he may have come to say?  Is that why I feel such desire to return to the scene, to get back to the dream?

I doubt it. After all, I have been taught to believe in the finality of death.  In the permanent separation of the dead from the living.  To believe that encounters with the dead in dreams are real encounters is mere fantasy. Yet, still I feel drawn back to the dream. I want to be there again, on the porch of my childhood home, in that sepia-toned scene, its details seemingly faded with age, with my father cast in shadow, rocking. 

I wonder. Was he somehow really there with me? Was that his spirit I saw hovering at the center of the scene? That golden brightness?

Cover Image: AI-generated by Gemini