Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift by Craig Lancaster - Edward Adrift Page A

13, 2011
    It’s 4:47 a.m.
    My father visited my dreams again. This is not an altogether rare occurrence, especially since he’s been dead, but my recent dreams about him have deviated from the norm in that they’ve been set earlier in my life, when I was just a boy. Most of the time, my father appears in my dreams as I knew him around the time he died, and I am generally around the age I was then or am now. I don’t like to use phrases such as “most of the time” and “generally,” as they provide no precision about the frequency of occurrence, but dreams are hard to enumerate (I love the word “enumerate”) and categorize. Science has proved that all mammals dream, and I certainly am a mammal, but just because I have dreams doesn’t mean I remember all of them when I am awake. Sometimes I can’t remember a single dream. Sometimes I remember only pieces of dreams and it’s hard to make sense of them in the conscious world. And sometimes I remember entire dreams with vividness, as if they were a movie or a TV show I watched. When my father appears in a dream, for better or for worse, I remember it in the latter way.
    This time we were again in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, on that long-ago trip, only it was a blend of that time and a time much earlier, one I’ve only read about in books. My father and I were out in the oil fields, where he oversaw a crew of men who were doing cathodic protection on oil pumps to keep them from corroding. That image is based on something that really happened. While in the field, in my dream, we met up with two men who were traveling in a wagon train, and this is where the dream becomes illogical. They introduced themselves as John Charles Fremont and Charles Preuss, and although this seemed perfectly natural in my dream, as I sit here now, eyes open, I know it is absurd. They were men of the 1840s. Fremont was a man who made important expeditions to the West, seeing many things in this part of the country before any other white man did, and Preuss was his long-suffering cartographer, who hated the very thing he was great at doing.
    In my dream, my father told me that Fremont and Preuss were men who had the courage to set out for frontiers that no one had seen before. The actual truth of the matter is that my father never said any such thing. If he knew anything about Fremont or Preuss, I never heard him talk about them. Furthermore, I know for a fact that my knowledge of both men comes from books and television. The question of how my brain came to blend Cheyenne Wells—which is far south of where Fremont and Preuss traveled—with two early-nineteenth-century explorers is likely to remain a mystery. There is just no logical explanation for it, and I am a person who values logic over all else.
    So now I lie on my back and try to make sense of something that defies conventional order, and this is perhaps the hardest thing anyone can ask me to do. In the time I’ve been on thistrip, my father has shown up in my dreams twice, both times we have been in Cheyenne Wells, Colorado, and I have been a little boy. I wonder what that means, or if it means anything at all. If I were an oneirologist, which is a person who studies dreams, I might have some basis for understanding this. I am not an oneirologist. And what of Fremont and Preuss? I can’t make sense of that, either. I remember watching a program on their expeditions and thinking that Preuss was the kind of person I would like, because he was very particular about things, just like I am. This quality made him a good cartographer but a bad explorer, and the program noted that Preuss never seemed to grasp the import of the things he saw. For example, Preuss once happily wrote in his journal that some of the men in the traveling party had successfully negotiated with the Indians for some salt, which would make their food taste better. The program I saw noted that Preuss said nothing about the fact that they discovered Lake Tahoe around