I wrote the following weeks ago.
* * * * * * * * *
Do you believe in ESP or is it all in
your head?
I knew a girl named Dawnette once.
Not closely, but enough to say hi to. We shared one class in high
school, and that was the extent of it. Once I was no longer in
school, there was little chance of an encounter. Our worlds did not
intersect.
So it was curious that one night I
dreamt of a chance encounter with her in a shopping mall. As in,
'What brought her to mind?' Not really that remarkable as dreams go,
just enough to stand out in my attention after waking. You know how
dreams go.
The every next day, I was at a shopping
mall and there she was. We said hi, and went on our mutual ways.
That's....well, you can say it was a a coincidence but it would be a
ridiculously large one. I've had more since then, and some of them
markedly upped the ante in terms of detail that turned out to
reflect real-life events. I had been a skeptic, and I applied
rational thinking to these experiences. In the end, the “rational”
explanations were so improbable as to be insulting.
It's worth pointing out that the mall
in the dream was not the mall we met at in real life the next day.
In the dream we met at Clackamas Town Center. In reality, I saw her
at Eastport Plaza. Dreams embellish, they get details wrong or at
least take poetic license.
* * * * *
Lori H. vanished without a word
near the end of '85. In 1986 I was plagued by bad dreams about her.
These dreams placed her in a certain place, a particular
predicament, and surrounded by specific persons. Nothing about her
had suggested any of these things, thy seemed to spring solely from
my imagination...yet there was a peculiar and disturbing resonance
to the dreams. They seemed more...immediate than other
dreams. More urgent somehow. I awoke from them with the
overwhelming conviction that they were not dreams but real.
Frustrating because – obviously – dreams are just dreams. That's
what I kept telling myself. Disturbing because I had no way to find
her or to verify that indeed dreams are just dreams and can never be
more. I needed to because I cared deeply for her, and these
insistent bad dreams left me feeling that I ought to be there for
her, ought to do something to help. They instilled in me a sense of
guilt for not being there. That was the big struggle, the tremendous
guilt over not being able to help and the urgency in convincing
myself it was all in my head.
One important detail: in the dreams,
there was a mutual friend trying to help her. I had no real-world
contact with him either, so could not reach out for confirmation.
I started binge-watching movie rentals
in a bid not to sleep. Stayed awake for days at a time until I
dropped. When I did finally sleep, it would be too deeply to dream.
The it would happen again.
It stopped after a year. 1987 was
blissfully free of bad dreams. That December, though, I met with the
aforementioned mutual friend. When I asked of Lori, he said “You'd
better sit down.” He then proceeded to tell me of her life in 1986
– not knowing that he was reciting my own bad dreams back to me
detail for detail. It really happened. It happened at the time I
was dreaming about it. I just hadn't had any way of knowing it
was happening. So how did I?
She was alright, by the way. I didn't
have to worry anymore. But it was kind of a mindfuck.
One more dream from that account, as it
seals the deal. My birthday had been coming up, and I was deep into
depression. I left a letter for her at her father's house. She had
been through enough that.(as I was told) it was not easy for her to
deal with people she knew, so I didn't hear back from her. I did,
however, have a dream on a particular Thursday that she was at her
father's home that day, met with her brother, and left again. The
following week I called her father to ask if she had been there....he
said yes, that it was probably the previous Thursday....after a
moment's thought he said, yes, it was definitely Thursday – he was
sure of it because Lori's brother had been in town and she'd very
much wanted to meet with him.
Try to tell me that's a coincidence.
Try real hard. And allow me to raise the most reasonable objection
so you don't have to, that perhaps I misremembered the dream to fit
the facts. It's a smart objection, I thought of it too. The fact is
that I had written the dream down and could refer back to it. I'd
been in the habit of writing down my dreams at the time. Especially
the ones I thought of as “those kind” of dreams, the ones that
felt somehow...more.
That's how you turn a skeptic into a
believer. Not just personal experience, but experience that can be
backed up with proof and can't be rationalized away as delusional.
Given what the dreams had consisted of and how shitty I felt after
each one, it was not something I had wanted to believe.
* * * * *
What do I want to say about Dana Marie?
Boy, at this point I don't know. I guess it depends on who I
imagine will read it, her or the people who know her. If the latter,
then I'd want to leave them with the ways she made an impression on
me. The Separator Wars of Kellogg, 8th Grade. Seeing her
onstage the first time, in The Music Man, which catalyzed me to
overcome my crippling shyness about trying out for a play (which I'd
always wanted to do but could never see myself doing). The way she
quietly reduced our teacher McNamee to a jittery mass of gibbering
madness. The odd reaction I had to seeing her with a cigarette for
the first time in the school parking lot (smoking suited Lori, it's
one of the things I missed about her, so it's not as if I've anything
against smoking...but for some reason it seemed all wrong on Dana).
If on the other hand Dana were reading?
What have I not already said? Or asked?
I think I'd ask her if she believes in
ESP. Or dreams.
I'd especially like to ask her if she
ever had a night somewhere in the 90's (I forget just when in that
era – mid-90's, I think) in which she was writing me a goodbye
letter, alone in the middle of the night, with an alarming aura of
finality about her, and for some reason her hand froze up and
wouldn't move, preventing her from finishing. That night in
particular I would love to know about, learn that it was just my
imagination – just a dream. .
You're balking, aren't you? It all so
sounds very irrational and unreasonable. I know, I've been there.
For instance, over the years I've had dreams in which Dana has been
under the leash of mafia figures. I don't know where that comes
from, and I reject it as having anything to do with the real world.
It's not just unreasonable, it's just fucking unthinkable.
I reject the idea, I won't have
it. But it would still be a relief to hear it from her:
“That's not real. You're nuts.”
It's not the only reason I find this
hard to let go, but it's one of them. I still have dreams of her
every now and then. Not many, almost never, and almost none of them
feel like “one of those”. But I always have to wonder. Have you
ever seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind? Talking with Dana is
my Devil's Tower.
* * * * *
In 1986, when I was having a year's
worth of bad dreams about Lori, I also had a just a few about Dana.
Same feeling of immediacy, like there was an extra layer of reality
about them. Same dream repeated. It didn't say much but it said
what was important. In the dream I am walking home from school, but
the geography is all wrong: I am walking through the warehouse
district, the streets empty. Dana sits alone on a loading dock,
knees pulled to her chest, arms folded over them. It's a defensive,
protective position. She is miserable
and lost in herself, and though I ask her what is wrong and try to
comfort her she is oblivious to my presence.
And I should have been there for her,
even if it was just a dream.
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