1/24/16
The things that happened in my dream last night feel more like a run on sentence than an actual dream, but I'll give it a shot.
My dad and my sister come to my hotel room to help me pack up and check out. I have a lot of stuff.
We pack up my sister's car and she leaves.
My dad and I take a break and go to an auditorium to attend a political rally where we meet the former Vice President Hubert H. Humphrey.
My dad turns into Martin Luther King, Jr. We stay in the balcony of the auditorium to see a play about two black woman running for the senate, starring Angela Bassett. There are actually three women on stage, and I'm puzzled because Angela seems to have the least meaty role.
I suppose I should mention that Marvin Hamlisch is also in the balcony watching nervously and operating the curtain from his seat. It seems he is one of the producers of the play.
Martin Luther King Jr gets into a verbal joust with some of the other playgoers and we scurry out of the theatre as he becomes agitated.
My dad is once again my dad, and we stop at a bar for a drink. I notice they're showing "What's Up, Doc?" on their TV, and I realize I've taken my dad to a gay bar.
We hightail it out of the bar and back to the hotel to clean out my room. Another family has already been let in so we only have a few minutes to grab what we can and go. In the end I take a laundry bag full of clothes and my dad's old baseball and basketball trophies from high school and college.
We go to his car so he can take me home, but I can not remember my address.
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It does seem like I've been dreaming about my dad a lot, and it sometimes leaves me a little shaken when I awake. You can glean all sorts of things about a person from their dreams, and sometimes they are uncomfortably personal. However, I will repeat the quote I once used to keep hung over my desk by Isak Dinesen:
"All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them."
It's a pretty famous quote, but today I learned it's really just a snippet of what she actually said, which I think gives the fragment a little more context.
"I am not a novelist, really not even a writer; I am a storyteller. One of my friends said about me that I think all sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them, and perhaps this is not entirely untrue. To me, the explanation of life seems to be its melody, its pattern. And I feel in life such an infinite, truly inconceivable fantasy."
Not unlike my dreams.
