Entry 8

The gods? I had been led to believe there was only one. Sometimes he was called Jesus. Sometimes the Holy Spirit. But most often just God.

Entry 8
August 12

I’ve had what are called lucid dreams twice in my life: once when I was ten years old, and that first night of the retreat. These are dreams in which you awake within the dream and you know you are dreaming. It’s very unsettling at first, as you examine the dream you’re in and realize you are its stage director, its script writer, and its cinematographer. There is an unfamiliar experience of power unlike anything else you have known. Reality, such as it is, cannot be manipulated in the way a lucid dream can be. Once you have your wings, you can fly. You can sail on your imagination and decide what you want to see and experience in your dream, as well as who you want to share the stage with.

When I was ten, my grandmother died from some form of cancer the adults would not talk about. Some kind of woman’s cancer, breast or ovarian. It wasn’t until I was in my teens that my mother told me it had been metastatic breast cancer and it had consumed my grandmother within a matter of months. Aggressive, they’d called it. And uncurable in any case.

I attended the viewing and the funeral. My grandmother Antonia, whom everyone called Toni and the children called Nonny, had been a sturdy woman from a working-class background. Her death was a shock to me less from the death itself than from Nonny being felled by anything at all. Hers was a formidable presence, and she had a particular fondness for me.

But to the dream: three nights after her funeral, I relived it in exact detail. This was a dream and I knew I was the dreamer. I was able to magically appear next to one relative or another and hear what they were saying. When one of the mourners was not sufficiently sad, I made him sob at the loss of such a great woman. And then I made Nonny sit up in her casket. She called me over and we talked for several minutes while no one else seemed to see me there.

“You’re a special boy,” she told me. “Someday you will know why.”

“But I don’t want to wait,” I replied, having no idea what being special meant.

“The gods act in their own time, boy.”

The gods? I had been led to believe there was only one. Sometimes he was called Jesus. Sometimes the Holy Spirit. But most often just God.

“Will you stay with me until then?” I asked.

“I’ll always be near. Now let me lie back down. I’m tired.”

Despite the nature of a lucid dream, I was unable to stop my grandmother from easing back into her casket and going silent. We had nothing more to say to each other.

That was the first lucid dream, and the second came that night in the cabin.

I was in a forest of some kind, somewhere. It was not quite dawn, but almost. I was walking along what appeared to be a path, and it was late autumn. The leaves had half-fallen from the trees, and the ones remaining were brown and gold. A wind blew.

I was frightened at first, still unaware of my own consciousness. Then it came to me in a flash: you’re awake but dreaming. Or I was dreaming, but awake. There isn’t any difference, and I have often thought all of life is a dream that only ends when we die.

I stopped along the path, surrounded by tall, dense trees, and I looked at my hands. I turned my palms up, then back. I stared down at my legs. And then at my shoes. They were covered in blood. Blood and ants. I was calm, undisturbed by it all, unafraid now that I knew the dream was mine to direct. Or so I thought.

“In here,” a familiar voice called.

It was my Nonny’s.

“Where are you?” I said loudly. A wind had kicked up, causing the leaves to rustle and the tree limbs to sway.

“Just a little further, boy.”

But I wasn’t a boy. I was me, an adult, wandering into the woods.

“Nonny?” I said, as I started walking toward the voice.

I trudged another minute. The path disappeared, turning into directionless ground. Leaves stuck to the blood on my shoes, and I felt several ants crawl up under my pant legs.

And then I found a clearing. Large, but surrounded by trees as if they were guarding it.

“Come see me,” Nonny’s voice said.

I thought it was disembodied. I looked around this way and that way, trying to determine where it came from.

“Closer, boy.”

When I looked forward again, there was a tree in the middle of the clearing. It must have been there before, but I didn’t remember seeing it. I stepped carefully toward it. Something was leaning against it, a large limb, I thought. The sky had not gotten any lighter, and I wondered if they sun had decided to stay hidden today.

“Yes,” she said.

I tip-toed now, closer and closer, until I saw that it wasn’t a limb at all. It was a walking stick.

“The gods act in their own time, boy,” she said, in a voice so close it could have whispered in my year.

I was shocked. I walked directly up to the tree, ignoring the walking stick. And there she was—my grandmother, embedded in the bark. I could clearly make out her face, and the faint smell of rose talc came to me. It was her smell, something I had never forgotten.

“Where are you?” I said, wanting an answer but fearing she would talk back to me from inside the tree.

“Waiting,” she replied.

“For what?”

“For you.”

I stumbled backward. It was a lucid dream, but I was trapped inside it. I was awake, but dreaming. I started shouting. “No! No! No!”

And I felt Larry shaking me. “Wake up, you’re having a bad dream. Wake up!”

I opened my eyes, breathing heavily. It was dark in the cabin, but the sun was rising. Faint light had begun seeping through the windows.

“You’re safe,” he said, as if he knew what I had dreamed.

I raised my head, looked at him through blinking eyes, and said, “No, I’m not.”

I eased back down on my pillow. Larry nodded and returned to his bed. I stared at the ceiling, relieved that everyone would be awake soon and I would not be alone.

— Anonymous