Schemes and Dreams

I rarely if ever recall my dreams (or hopes for that matter) but I did earlier this week as Sunday night was bleeding into Monday morning and outside we were having a fistfight between Spring and the lovely day we had on Saturday and yet more winter which did some heavy shoving on Sunday. 

I slept through the transition or most of it. When I headed to the gym around four it was raining and misting with a nasty wind, not a breeze but a full sock you in the nose wind, that made everything shine with a glaze as we hovered just above freezing.

I had trouble getting the cobwebs out of my head when I arose. I had been having a dream where I was somewhere on the Jersey Shore (I'm guessing that because places like Point Pleasant Beach and Ocean Grove were involved) with my father who was struggling to file his income taxes. 

It's plural for a reason. There was a time when my dad worked as a teacher in NYC and paid, in addition to federal income taxes, both New York State as well as New York City income taxes. He and tens if not hundreds of thousands of others got plucked by both Albany as well as Gracie Mansion to pay for goods and services they rarely used. In those days, when my father was alive, neither New Jersey where we lived or Connecticut, where I now live, had income taxes. 

My father died almost thirty-seven years ago and I racked my brain all Monday morning trying to recall if I had any memories of him ever working on taxes, drawing a blank entirely. The most disquieting part of the dream that I recall is the conversations he was attempting to have with our son, Patrick, in the dream a full adult, even though Patrick was born thirteen months after my father passed. 

I've done a reasonable amount of reading over the years on what causes us to dream, perhaps better phrased as what causes us to remember our dreams, back from a while ago when I kept dreaming I was being choked by someone from behind whose identity I never knew. 

At some point after months and months of both dreaming and dread,it stopped or I just stopped remembering or (perhaps?) whoever was attacking me in my sleep got  bored and moved on.Even in my sleep I'm boring I guess.

I'm not the only one who has trouble in his dreams, or in my case, with them, I know that but it doesn't do me much good to believe in safety in numbers. I'm thinking of trying eyes wide-open sleeping in the hopes of learning what's farther ahead than I'm able to see now.   
-bill kenny