Dreams are crazy things, little film strips your brain makes up just for the occasion: namely, sleep. What's more, you have little control over what your brain serves up, from simple reviews of the day to vivid mindscapes of incredible feeling and beauty. Some folks (like my wife) remember little of their dreams; others (like myself) can relate entire scenes with considerable detail. Sometimes our emotional reaction to the dream is completely incongruous to the content; who hasn't woken up from a nightmare that doesn't seem very scary once they've thought about it for a minute or two? ("I remember...looking at the sky, and I watch this sparrow land on the park bench and it, like, looks at me. That's when I woke up shrieking.")
I dream a lot; what's more, I remember much of them. They fall into different categories, mostly based on events long past. I dream a lot about college, for instance. However, I don't dream about class very often; I tend to dream about the campus and the immediate neighborhood around it. Moreover, undergrad and graduate school tend to melt together in my dreams: Peoria, where I attended college, and Urbana-Champaign, where I attended graduate school, seem to merge into my dream college experience, leaving me with a University of Illinois-size campus in Peoria.
I dream a lot about high school as well. It's funny: I clearly remember graduating from high school, but my brain does not seem to believe this, so I'm constantly going back to high school. I'm forever missing classes I need to graduate, usually art class or English. Sometimes I've been in high school for upwards of a decade; other times I have to go back because it turns out I didn't have enough credits to graduate, and the high school is making me come back to finish up. What's more, I'm constantly forgetting to show up to my classes. Some classes I've been cutting for months. (In reality, I never cut a class in high school; I saved that habit for college.) My high school, like college, is much larger in my dreams; it boasts four floors instead of three, with hidden classrooms, stairwells, and hallways. And yes, I occasionally forget both the location and the combination to my locker.
But the place I dream about most frequently is South Floral Park, where I spent my adolescence. In reality, South Floral Park is a small village of fewer than two thousand people. It boasts no commercial development, no industry, strictly residential. If you plopped it in the middle of Illinois, it wouldn't entirely look out of place. This village sits next to Belmont Racetrack and abuts the line between New York City and the rest of Long Island, yet is untouched by both. If you live there and want something to do, you go elsewhere.
It's not difficult to figure out why I dream of this geographic dot so frequently; I lived in my grandparents' house there for nearly six years, longer than any address I've resided before or since. My father and I lived in the attic (separate rooms), my grandparents on the first floor, my cousin in the basement. As with the schools, the house assumes new dimensions in my dreams. The storage areas in the attic expand to impossible sizes, housing gorgeous antiques: neon jukeboxes, art deco furniture, old iron sculptures, all clean and lit up as if ready for use. The basement lacks such treasures, but doors lead to an endless series of wooden stairwells, leading to similarly infinite basements. All are empty or nearly so, but the temptation to continue down the stairs is strong. After a half-dozen or so basements, I will stop, suspecting a trap, or a fear of losing my bearings. Both the front and backyards pop up frequently, as well as the driveway, the fences dividing our property from our neighbors', the ivied back fence blocking the view of the house on the street next to ours. The entire property stars in my dreams many, many times a week, creating a parallel dream universe so vivid, I occasionally find it difficult to sift the dream memories from the reality which, like most realities, fades into cerebral oblivion as time rolls on.
What all of these dreams have in common is the situation: The house has been sold, and I'm helping my grandparents move out. Sometimes my grandfather has died; other times he is still alive. Sometimes my father or cousin is living with them, other times not. The constant, however, is getting my grandparents out of the house, while looking about for what seems to be the last time.
Not just the house appears in my dreams; the entire town makes an appearance. I always walk towards the house, but always from different directions: sometimes I get there from Elmont, walking to town via Adams Street; other times from Floral Park, from Webster Street through the dead end, in reality part of the path I took to my high school.
The grandparents of my dreams are somewhat shadowy ephemera, much like most dream characters, but I feel a strong attachment to them. In reality, I liked them (and loved my grandmother dearly), but I rarely had the opportunity to really know them. Moreover, I never had the opportunity to say goodbye to them before they passed on. It almost doesn't seem necessary to do so, since they visit me almost every night.
Speaking of which, it's time for bed. See you later, Nana and Grampa.
