Table of Contents

Attribute #1 : Dreams Ignore Physical Reality

Attribute #2 : Dreams Foretell Future Events

THE SATURDAY EVENING, MARCH 10TH REALITY

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There are two attributes about dreams that I find interesting : on the one hand, the first one is one that I think pretty much everyone agrees with; while, on the other hand, the second, is one that frequently gets dismissed as intellectual nonsense that is not supported by any empirical evidence, and some folks will even roll their eyes at you, suspecting you of possessing a low I.Q., if you admit you even mildly believe in any claims of the second attribute’s validity.

Specifically…

Attribute #1 : Dreams Ignore Physical Reality

It’s funny how dreams seem to violate many rules-of-reality, and yet, we never really question the validity of those reality-ignoring violations while we’re smack dab in the middle of that dream while it’s in progress.

For some people, they may find themselves flying like a bird over an open field; or perhaps, they somehow traveled from Point A to Point B (a distance, that, in reality, is, say, a dozen, or even hundreds, of miles apart from each other) in the flash of a second—faster than if the U.S.S. Enterprise had teleported them between the two locales.

One moment, they’re at home in their kitchen, talking on the phone with their mother, and in the blink of an eye, they’re at the ball park, waiting in line at the concession stand, talking to their boss; and they don’t even second guess the irrational component of that faster-than-the-speed-of-light journey, nor the fact that the boss isn’t even likely to be found at a ball park since he or she has no interest in sports. Again, dreams don’t care about reality.

For me, personally, one dream that I recall as being completely reality-ignoring, occurred approximately seven or eight years ago.

I dreamt that my father and I were down in some basement, that, in retrospect, was neither my basement, nor any other basement I’ve ever seen before—but, at that time, during the dream, I didn’t question my unfamiliarity with the room, and I unsuspectingly worked on, completely oblivious to the fact that I had never been there before.

We were working on some kind of do-it-yourself “manly” type of project of which I do not recall the details since the dream didn’t seem to last long enough—or, at least, I only remember a few seconds of it—to clearly indicate what that project was.

What I do remember was that we were both standing around a rather large table, and I needed the hammer which was beyond my reach, and yet, was well within his. I asked him to hand it to me, and he did.

There was nothing positively elating or negatively ominous about the dream–it was completely neutral from an emotive perspective.

In fact, the reality-ignoring quirk about the dream was the fact that my father had been dead for more than 20 years at that time (i.e., he passed away in June of 1989, and my dream took place somewhere in the early 2010’s).

Yet, after all these years of him being dead, I’m standing in the same room with him, and I saw nothing out of the ordinary about his presence.

I didn’t excitedly hug him, like one would expect someone to do when they’ve re-encountered a person they love and haven’t seen in over two decades. Nor did I freak out and think, “Wow! You’re supposed to be dead! What are you doing here?”

Nope. Instead, I just plugged along in a completely nonchalant manner, as though there was nothing unusual about watching him stand there and talking to me, as though he never died in the first place.

The reality of his chronologically-distant passing was not relevant to his presence in my dream.

Dreams ignore reality, and I’m sure, pretty much everyone agrees with me that, although not everyone’s dreams become far-fetched, they all bend the rules to some extent.

Attribute #2 : Dreams Foretell Future Events

This is the one that I’m expecting most people to doubt, but that’s just fine with me since my acceptance of what happened to me, is not contingent on others believing it, too.

I was there. I saw it happen. I know the truth of the “what”, but I never understood the “why” or “how” the events unfolded as they did—in almost perfect sequence.

This is the one that I see as being problematic in expecting others to believe in, but I have no way of explaining the eerie similarities between the details of my dream during the night of March 9th, 1990, and the actual unfolding of events during the very next evening—March 10th.

I had been dating a woman (I’ll change her name to protect her privacy) named “Michelle”, who had recently graduated with a teaching credential and was teaching the French language to a junior high school out in the far west suburbs.

On the one hand, Michelle was so conservative in all of her ways, especially her sense of fashion ( e.g., a fur coat, and white gloves on, whenever climate permitted) that, in comparison, she made Queen Elizabeth look like a tramp.

Michelle frequently told me that when she got her first house, she wanted a gazebo in the back yard so she could wave to all her friends (the way a queen waves to her subjects) at back yard parties.

Katherine Hepburn was Michelle’s idol. She thought Miss Hepburn was breathtakingly beautiful (an assessment which—with all due respect—I could not relate to in the slightest) and she further thought that Spencer Tracy was the ideal man, which made him the perfect match for Miss Hepburn .

On the subject of sexual morés, to say that Michelle wanted to save herself for marriage would’ve been an understatement. After third base, there was a mile-tall electric fence, fortified with armed guards, en route to home plate.

Her “prize” was safer than it would have been if it had been stored at Fort Knox.

On the other hand, I was completely the opposite.

Spencer Tracy, I was not. Not even close.

I was way too “James Dean” (i.e., tee shirt; jeans; leather jacket; played in a rock band; smoked cigarettes; smoked pot; drank beer and vodka tonics; I wasn’t afraid to have a potty mouth when I thought it was appropriate; and, in contrast to those people who like to have a cigarette after sex, I wanted to have sex after every cigarette.

Michelle even once half-jokingly stated to me, “You are governed by your id, Mister” if that gives you any idea of how she saw my testosterone-induced relentless pursuit of her virginity.

We were polar opposites of each other. We were a total mismatch for each other.

Nowadays, an entity such as EHarmony would definitely NOT put us together.

For that, and a variety of other easily-foreseeable reasons , Michelle and I had been hitting some rough spots in our relationship, and I was enduring a pretty significant case of anxiety-induced insomnia as a result of the ongoing conflict between us. I even went to my primary to see if he could prescribe me something to bring the anxiety level down a notch or two, to help me sleep, which he did, and it did help.

Until I got my hands on that pharmaceutical assistance, I was finding myself all-too-often just lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, for hours on end, fading in and out with my eyes wide open, and never really entering any deep REM states of sleep.

Every morning I was feeling light-headed and dizzy and experiencing mild-but-long-lasting headaches for not having enough sleep under my belt, which I’d have to quantify at less than two full hours of shut eye per night, and essentially none of that was REM sleep. I was just barely drifting off because I was so fatigued.

However, with the medicine, I was able to fall asleep and enter into REM sleep and I was having some vivid dreams, and the night of March 9th, was certainly no exception.

THE FRIDAY NIGHT, MARCH 9TH DREAM

A pre-dream side note : In real life, I was driving my recently-deceased father’s full-sized 1983 Chevy Caprice, since my much-smaller 1987 Chevy Nova had been totaled in a black ice-induced, rear-end accident just two months earlier (on December 30th—the day before New Year’s Eve) out in Streamwood Illinois. It was an accident that Michelle was with me during.

We were both fortunate, in that neither of us were injured in the slightest. The car got totaled because the trunk got rammed into the back seat—so, off to the junk yard that car went.

In any case, in my March 9th dream, my immediate family (i.e., my mother, two sisters and one of my two brothers—the other brother residing out of state, in Ellensburg, Washington at the time) and I were en route to go see my widowed paternal grandmother, Nellie, who, again, in real life, actually lived with my mother at the time, but, for whatever reality-ignoring reason—in the dream—lived on her own in her own single family dwelling….as usual, in a house I had never seen before, and I didn’t question that detail, either.

In the dream, we took two separate cars. Why? I haven’t a clue.  I drove, by myself, in my father’s Caprice, and everyone else drove together in a separate vehicle.

It was nighttime. and the weather was cool and wet in a heavily-foggy, mist-like environment.

Adding to the list of things that happen “for some unknown reason”, we also failed to park right out in front of Grandma’s house, but instead parked something like a full two blocks away—eerily outside the outer perimeter of a cemetery, although not any specific cemetery: just a plain ol’ graveyard

We parked together, and exited our vehicles and I momentarily, stood there in the dark, foggy environment, staring in apprehension, at the super tall wrought iron fence that bordered the burial ground.

We then began the two block trek without any umbrellas, and the precipitation began to increase in intensity from a mist to a light drizzle, getting us all wet in the process.

Characteristic of most dreams, we magically went from being two blocks away in the rain, to suddenly already being inside my grandma’s kitchen in the blink of an eye, and I never questioned the irrationality of our incredibly fast journey.

Back then, we were all smokers (every single one of us—Grandma, Ma, Linda, Nancy, Jim, and myself; not one of us was a non-smoker) and I was Jonesin’ for my nicotine fix; and yet, oddly, we weren’t allowed to smoke in Grandma’s house (go figure), so I decided to go outside, by myself, and have a smoke.

Her house was a slab-based, one-story, brick-built ranch, located in a stereotypical union-labor, working class neighborhood, of manicured lawns, where every driveway was populated by a relatively new domestic car, truck or van. There were no abandoned-looking homes or rust bucket-looking vehicles anywhere to be seen. It was overall a very comfortable environment—outside of the somewhat ominous “foggy, rainy night” theme of the dream.

I stepped outside and now the precipitation had increased from a light drizzle to fairly heavy raindrops. I was standing under a small awning, which really didn’t afford me much protection against the wind-blown drops of rain hitting me in the face.

I put my cigarette in my mouth, and went to light it up, only to discover that my disposable lighter wasn’t working, it was out of fluid. Each flick of the wheel generated sparks, but no flame.

“Damn!” I thought to myself as I realized I had to go back inside and borrow a lighter from someone

I, then, quickly realized that I had mistakenly closed the locked door behind myself and soon discovered that I couldn’t get back inside. I began to knock for someone to come and open the door, but no one came.

Suddenly…

A very distraught Michelle (represented not by herself, but rather by a life-sized cardboard cutout of her body; a cutout that actually had physical clothes draped over it) had cartwheeled itself from the public sidewalk, across the front lawn, and over to me, just off to the side of the concrete step I was standing on—and the face on the cutout was animated enough for her to be crying and saying some uninterpretable syllables.

Despite the gibberish being spoken, it was clear that she was visibly upset about something—more than likely, many things.

In the meantime, I just stood there, almost in a state of horror, staring at her as she cried on and on.

Then, the cardboard cutout, itself, collapsed—under the weight of the drenched clothes on soaked corrugated paper—and fell to the ground leaving nothing but a pile of wet clothes.

Suddenly, the real Michelle, similarly upset and crying, walked up (from out of nowhere) and pointed disappointingly at the pile of clothes on the ground, as she bent over, picked them up, and walked away from me.

Watching her walk across the lawn, with her back to me, really shook me up, and then I turned to again to knock on my grandmother’s front door.

What initially began as a calm knock, quickly morphed into a desperate and rapid pounding of my fists on the door, in addition to a lot of panicked door bell-ringing—much like the outro of the old Flintstones cartoons where Fred is pounding on the door shouting, “Wilma!”, but she never answers the door.

And then, I woke up, staring around the bedroom, somewhat relieved that it was only a dream.

THE SATURDAY EVENING, MARCH 10TH REALITY

We hadn’t broken up yet. In fact, we hadn’t even had an argument in more than a week at that time; and yet, there was something inherently fragile about the environment we shared. I couldn’t read her mind and tell you what was going on in her head, but I felt like I was constantly walking on eggs, in fear of cracking the otherwise delicate shell of our emotions toward each other.

Michelle had called me around 10:00AM that day to say “Good Morning” and also that she wanted to talk about a few things, which was a meeting I was looking forward to.

Finally, the late afternoon arrived, and Michelle (who was from the Elk Grove Village area) had come to my place in Brookfield. She parked out on the street, came in, and we sat in the kitchen for a few moments, deciding what we wanted to do, and we decided to go have dinner at a place called Copperfield’s in Berwyn, which was located along the south side of the Burlington-Northern tracks in between Oak Park and Grove Avenues.

We ended up driving to the restaurant in my father’s Caprice.

We had our dinner and I was having my mandatory after-dinner cigarette, and Michelle blurted out, “Ya’ know, I haven’t seen my grandparents in a while, in like way more than a year, or so.”

The only family members of hers that I had already met were her parents and her three step brothers.

Her father’s current wife was actually his second marriage, and she had three boys of her own, all of whom she lived with in a multi-level single family dwelling on the far west end of Elk Grove off of Meacham Avenue and Biesterfield Road.

Michelle was not at all close to her biological mother, so not only did I never meet her, but Michelle deliberately avoided talking about her, and I knew not to inquire about any details.

But I was game to meet more of her other family members, if that was a sign that she had long-term plans for our relationship.

“Where they at?” I asked in anticipation.

“In Winnetka.” she replied.

“Isn’t that like a real ritzy area with rich people?” I pressed on.

“Yep.” she laughed, “With U-shaped driveways, swimmin’ pools and movie stars.”

“Well, you point the way.” I added, “I’m not sure where we’re going.”

“Not a problem, I do.” she said giving me an affectionate kiss on the lips.

A few minutes later, I paid the bill, left a tip, and out the door we went.

Being early March, it still got dark relatively early, by 7:00PM, or so. By the time, we left the restaurant, it was already dusk and getting darker as we drove down the street.

It was also lightly misting out, and there was a hint of fog at ground level, which I could see in the beams of my headlights.

Several miles westward, on Ogden Avenue in the Western Springs/Hinsdale area, was the entrance ramp to get onto northbound Interstate I-294 (i.e., The Tri-State Tollway)—the fastest way to get up to the northern suburbs.

On the one hand, with Michelle being a non-smoker, she would always ask me to open my car window a tad when I’d smoke, so that the car’s interior wouldn’t fill up with smoke, which I was always happy to do for her.

On the other hand, I knew that it was going to be at least an hour’s drive, so, I knew we’d be in the car for a while.

Although I was not exactly a chain smoker, I was undeniably a “slightly-more-than-a-pack-a-day” type of person, and even though I just had a smoke a half hour earlier at the restaurant, I lit up another smoke, anyway, for the long ride.

I normally used Bic® lighters almost exclusively since they were so dependable, whereas those cheapie, Scripto® and other off brand lighters frequently failed to fire up on the first strike even when they have a full chamber of butane, and which also seemed to exhaust themselves so much more rapidly compared to Bics.

In this case, all I had on me was one of those see-through, Amber-colored Scriptos, which was visibily down to a sixteenth of an inch of fuel, whereas it would be more like two full inches had it been a new lighter.

Being so low on butane, it sparked two or three times before it actually generated a flame.

“I’m gonna have to stop at a gas station en route and buy a new lighter.” I commented as I succeeded in lighting my smoke, and I placed the soon-to-be-exhausted lighter back into my shirt pocket along with my pack of smokes, realizing that the in-dash cigarette lighter didn’t work. (Blown fuse? Bad element? Not sure. I only know that pushing it in, never caused it to heat up or pop back out ready to be used).

Anyway, once we got to Willow Road, she told me to take that eastward, toward the lake (as in Lake Michigan), which I did.

Throughout the entire ride on Willow Road, I don’t remember ever seeing a single gas station, except one, I think, and it was closed for the evening. It was definitely an older building that looked like it rarely had customers to begin with. Very old and Mayberry-ish looking.

Anyway, we took that all the way until it ended at a “T” in the road, at (what I believed to be) Sheridan Road.,

She instructed me to turn right ( going southbound) and I did and there was an entrance to a beach area nearby. But that was 30 years ago, so I forget how close or far the beach entrance was to the T in the road.

Again, it was all foggy and dark out just like in my dream. There was even a wrought iron fence around the parking area , but unlike the fence in my dream, which was super tall, this fence was only about five, maybe six, feet in height , or so; not toweringly tall like in my dream; and it wasn’t a cemetery, but, rather, the parking lot for the beach.

Suddenly, Michelle realized that she wasn’t as sure about her whereabouts as she initially thought she would be once we were in the area.

The gates to the beach parking lot were not closed, so it was possible to pull into the parking lot, which she asked me to do.

“You got a map in the glove compartment, don’t you?” she asked as she opened the compartment door, and pointed at the lot. “Pull into the parking lot so I can check out something on the map. I forgot if we should’ve taken a left or a right at the ‘T’ in the road.”

I pulled into the lot—albeit with that same sense of apprehension I had in my dream, since the fog had literally limited visibility to only about a dozen feet, or so—and that was only where my headlights were aimed. Outside of the beams of my headlights, there could’ve been a Dracula or serial killer standing almost within arm’s reach of the car, and we wouldn’t have seen them until it was too late.

“Lock your door.” I said to her as I locked my door, and looked around in all directions keeping an eye out for any possible dangers lurking in the foggy mist.

Michelle grabbed the map out of the compartment, turned on the interior dome light, unfolded the map, and ran her finger up and down the section pertaining to the Winnetka area as she searched for the destination she intended to reach.

Then, it dawned on me (in that pre-cell phone era) that Michelle never used the pay phone at the restaurant to call her grandparents to tell them that we were coming up for a visit.

“Ya’ know, now that I think about it, you never called them to let them know that we were coming up to see ’em, did ya’?” I asked her . “I mean, should we just pop in on ’em out of the clear blue. They could be in their PJ’s gettin’ ready for bed, for all we know.”

“Hardly necessary.” she replied, “Since they went to bed a long time ago.”

I looked at her all confused.

“They’re dead.” she added, clarifying that otherwise important detail.

“So, we’re going to a…cemetery?” I asked.

“That’s usually where they keep dead people.” she quipped.

I just shook my head at the irony of how all those crazy little parallels were coming about—my grandmother and her grandparents; the fog, mist and rain; the wrought iron fence.

“Looks like we’re good. We’re going in the right direction. I just wanted to make sure.” she said, finally locating our destination on the map, as she refolded the map in put it back into the glove compartment.

I wasted no time in pulling out of that eerie, fog-filled and completely unlit parking lot, and we continued on in our southbound direction.

We finally reached the cemetery where her grandparents were buried, and we pulled into the outer driveway, that was outside the vehicle entrance gates; and there it was : that much-taller-than-me wrought iron fence that was almost identical to the one in my dream.

By the time we arrived there, the wind had kicked up, the rainfail had increased to a drizzle, but the fog was beginning to decrease in intensity. Maybe the wind and heavier rainfall helped dissipate the fog. Not sure why. But the relative increase in visibility decreased the creepiness of walking around in the dark. But significantly increased the wetness factor.

In this case, the gates to the cemetery were closed, but there was a wide open area where pedestrians, or anyone on a bike, could easily enter the premises.

There was a spot off to the side where we could park and not be in anyone’s way, so I pulled into that spot, killed the ignition, and proceeded to exit the vehicle.

“Wait!, I want to show you something.” Michelle said, as she pulled out of her suitcase-sized purse a small brown paper bag that was all rolled up, which she unrolled and then pulled out a necklace that her grandmother had given to her before she passed away.

“Look. Isn’t that pretty?” Michelle asked me as she handed it to me for my appraisal. “My grandma gave that to me before she passed on.”

I smiled and nodded affirmatively as I pretended to agree, since I’ve never had even the slightest interest in jewelry of any kind : rings; earrings; neclaces; wrist bands; heck I don’t even wear a watch.

In any case, after we both expressed our visual appreciation for the necklace, I handed it back to her, and she put it back in the paper bag, rolled it up, put the bag back into her purse, and then proceeded to exit the vehicle.

She slung her purse over her shoulder as she stood up outside the car, waiting for me to come around to her side of the car and meet her.

I walked around the front of the car, toward her, and in her special, classy way, she grabbed my arm as we walked side-by-side toward the cemetery entrance .

We only got about a hundred yards past the entrance point when she suddenly stopped dead in her tracks, and she momentarily stared down at the ground.

“What’s wrong?” I asked, ever-so-sincerely, realizing that she was deeply preoccupied with certain unknown concerns and wondering what thoughts were going on inside her head.

She slowly raised her gaze from the ground and looked into my eyes and said, “I’m not really sure where exactly they’re buried. It’s been a few years since I was last here. In fact, I was only about twelve or 13 years old, when I last came here with my parents.”

But I could sense that a lack of knowing the “exact spot” of her grandparents headstones was not the only thing on her mind.

“And?” I said, hoping she’d be more honest and open about what she was thinking.

“And what?” she said, pretending to have nothing else on her mind.

“Well, there’s obviously something else bothering you.” I said putting my arm around her and gently kissing her on the lips as the wind kicked up and tossing a handful of raindrops at both our faces.

Visibly uncomfortable with the sudden change in weather conditions, she enclosed the two collar flaps of her fur coat around her neck to stop the wind and rain from running down her chest into her cleavage, and she then turned away from me, and started walking back toward the car, and said, “Let’s get outta here. We’re never gonna find their graves. I don’t know why I dragged you up here all this way in the first place.”

“That’s fine. That’s not a problem.” I said, as I began to follow her back toward the car. “I just wish you’d tell me what’s really on your mind.”

“We’ll talk in the car.” she replied as she continued to walk hurriedly as the more-frequent wind gusts continued to throw more rain in our faces.

For several strides, we walked side-by-side in silence without saying a single word to each other, as I tried to figure out what the magic words were that would get her to open up and start talking.

She then took her purse off her shoulder in search of a kleenex to wipe her runny nose, which she did.

While she was wiping her nose, I felt that I didn’t want to cause her any nausea in the car with cigarette smoke, so, I figured I’d try to get in as many drags as possible before getting in, so I put a cigarette in my mouth, grabbed my shitty Scripto lighter which, like I mentioned before, still had some fluid left in the chamber, and flicked it and flicked it and flicked it and flicked it, and all it did was frustratingly generate one flameless spark after another and finally it lit up, but (damn!) a wind gust came along and blew out the flame before I could light my smoke.

“Son of a f—– bitch!” I exclaimed in anger at the lighter’s failure to generate a usable flame.

Suddenly, Michelle, while putting her used kleenex back into her purse had somehow inadvertently ejected that necklace-containing paper bag out of her purse, and it fell onto the ground in a shallow puddle of water, and immediately got soaked, just like the cardboard in the dream.

“I got it!” I said to her as I saw it hit the ground.

I bent over, picked up the wet bag, and handed it to her, and, as she took the wet bag from my hand, she looked at me, and started to cry without saying any words, and walked away toward the car.

Just like in my dream the night before.

I put my cigarette and lighter back into my pocket and went to reach out and hold her and comfort her, but she refused my attempt, and walked away from me and toward the car and said, “Take me home!” (although she meant “take me back to my car” since her car was back at my house in Brookfield).

There was no denying that she she was more than “just merely upset with me”. I could feel it in my bones that she wanted to break up.

I walked ahead of her and opened the car door for her, and she got in, and then I got in and we sat quietly in the parking spot with the car not running for about five minutes as I tried to think of something to say that would make everything right.

But I couldn’t think of a single syllable that would’ve helped one iota.

Ever-so-quietly, she said, “Let’s go back to your house.”

I self-deceptively took her statement to ambiguously mean that once we got back to my place, we’d go inside and talk things out. But the entire ride home was almost in complete silence, and I put on the radio not out of a need for entertainment but a need to cover up the dead silence that was taking place between us.

Once we parked in front of my house, Michelle just sat there in the passenger seat, quietly trying to think of what she was going to say to me. And she finally spoke.

“Ya’ know, I think we should…take a break…from each other…for a while.” she said with long breaks of silence in between sets of words.

I just sat there in listened with my heart breaking with every syllable she spoke.

When she finished her speech, she kissed me on the cheek, exited the vehicle, got into her car, and pulled away .

For the next several weeks, she wouldn’t take any of my calls.

Although we did get back together in mid-April, our reunification lasted only for three more months as we broke up for good just before the Fourth of July.

I should’ve known Katherine Hepburn and James Dean would not have been a likely-to-workout relationship.

We were supposed to go to Milwaukee for the Bastille Day celebration in mid-July, but we never made it that far.

In closing, I think the parallels between my dream and the events of the following evening are just simply too hard to explain.

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