I have always dreamt. Wild, fantastical realities fill my nights. I not only dream in color, I dream things
before they happen. What goes on while I sleep informs who I am, my friendships, my romances and the way I work. Or the work I do. My dreams send me messages. And I don't mean books telling me what my dreams mean. I don't need someone else's words, I have my own.
When I was a child, and well into my young adult years, I had a number of rotating/recurring dreams. Many of them nightmares. Because of my odd knack for knowing "seeing the future", few of my family members discredited my dreams. How I dream, what I dream, tells me a lot about what's really going on in my waking life. Or they inform me in ways other people might forget or omit.
One night, while in high-school and living with my grandparents in Long Island, NY, I awoke in the middle of the night crying. Something was very wrong but I was too shaken to know exactly what. I woke my grandmother up and begged her to try calling my mother in Minnesota. By dawn, and after innumerable phone-calls, we knew for certain where my mother was. She was not ok, but at least she was alive.
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Every job I have produces a nightmare. In retrospect, some of them can be be quite funny, if dark. In the days, or even weeks before a new job, I tend to have the nightmare from the previous workplace. Like a child barely sleeping before Christmas morning's arrival, I sleep fitfully before a new job or dream the first day through, as if I am there already doing it, before the alarm wakes me.
Sometimes the nightmare's subject is vague. No lead in, no plot, no resolve.
The night before my recent tasting I dreamt that I went back to work at Bouchon. You could call this a recurring nightmare, except that it's not the same exact dream landscape-set over and over, but it is
similar. In this most recent version I was back living in Napa (also part of the nightmare), but while they made room for me at Bouchon I was to go back to The French Laundry and help out in pastry.
In the nightmares, The French Laundry has the exact same kitchen feel as the actual kitchen (tight and pressed like a permanently furrowed brow) but its surroundings look like an English country estate, complete with stiff hedgerows and quaint gardening sheds. Ironically, The French Laundry of my dreams is much bigger than it is in real life. But I knew the kitchen was a dream because the pastry chef was someone who looked like Alex Espiritu, whom I only recently met, but older, and the
counters were sticky. (As you can well imagine, it stays quite clean there. Like a laboratory.)
The nightmare was current, which threw me for a bit of a loop, because when I saw Thomas, I expressed my concern about his father's recent car accident.
At the edge of the nightmare, my mother visited. In the dream she was attempting to support me before the tasting. Just sit with me, as it were. I wasn't sleeping well, with the nightmare and the nervousness about getting all my ducks in a row by 5 am Monday. (I don't really like waking up that early. Ever.) But, if you can try and imagine this, I attempted to come out of the nightmare just enough to
acknowledge my mother, but not wake up completely, or anymore.
In the dream she apologizes for keeping me awake. For attempting to be there for me, but keeping me from sleeping. Moments before the dreadful alarm beeps (I can only imagine that the
person who invented this awful contraption was blessed with Narcolepsy) I am trying to thank my mother for visiting and disallowing her to say sorry for something I am not at all sorry for, but grateful. Eternally and truly.
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Sometimes the nightmare or dream is as real as the life it is attempting to replicate.
Sometimes the nightmare or dream is many things, like life.
A visit from someone who is gone.
Bittersweet.
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