A Dream

Last night I dreamt of my father. We were expecting him for dinner, but he was late. Just as we decided not to wait for him any longer, I saw him laboriously climbing the stairs to our apartment. “Dad,” I called out to him, “use the elevator!” I guided him down the stairs to the floor below and entered the elevator with him. Inside was an upholstered bench in the Directoire style, a pleasing addition until I noticed that the upholstery was worn and in parts torn.

My father died 34 years ago at the age of 77. I’m now three years older than he was at the time of his death, but of course in dreams as well as in conscious thought he's always older than I. In the first years after his death, when I dreamt of him, it was always with a sense of enormous relief and joy: he wasn’t dead after all! But for at least the past twenty years, there’s been no heightened emotion when he appears in my dreams, for there he has never died; he still exists in all the ordinariness of everyday life.

I don’t belong to a culture that believes that the dream of a dead parent provides a message from the other world. If I did, I might have written “my father came to me in a dream.” He didn’t come to me. I dreamt of him. He had no message. Indeed, he said nothing at all. He was, of course, like the elevator bench, a projection of my perception of myself – old and wearing out. What did the Directoire style represent? It was popular during the French post-revolutionary period of the 1790’s. It suggests, perhaps, the revolution implied by a son becoming older than his father.

After I die, after my siblings die, who will dream of our father? It’s unlikely that our children will dream of him. Instead, they will dream of us.

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