faces—and these were tough kids, man—I mean, these kids really, really loved Dad.
The only grandmother I knew was on my mom’s side, my dad’s parents having died long before I could remember. My father’s family was third- or fourth-generation Jewish Americans, originally from Hungary, but my mom’s mother barely escaped Poland just as all the Nazi shit started to hit the fan. She fled with three daughters, leaving her husband to come meet them later. Two of the girls died before she made it safely to New York City. That’s where she had my mother and my mother’s baby sister, Natalie. And although my grandmother wasn’t a particularly religious person when she was in Poland, because of the whole debacle of being ethnically threatened and shot at and her children dying simply because they were Jewish, she found religion when she got to the United States. Imagine losing your flesh and blood, your little daughters, to some insane global hatred? She became more and more religious as she got older. She was the reason why my parents insisted I get bar mitzvahed and all that stuff. My mom was not particularly religious, and my dad, although a true humanist, was a self-declared agnostic; he had a palpable disdain for anything religious. But out of respect for my grandmother, everybody kind of wanted me to go through the motions, which is what I did. And that’s all because she was such a great lady and commanded true respect.
I hung around with Mom for the few weeks before school started, but soon after I returned I suddenly felt like I existed in a surreal world, partially because one of the strangest things I ever experienced occurred. And it happened every night while I slept. Prior to this I never really had an ability to remember my dreams, but that suddenly changed dramatically. It happened for one full year after my father died, for 365 days exactly. Then it stopped, and I haven’t been able to remember dreams more than in snippets ever since. But that year, every night when I went to sleep, from the first moment until I woke up, I experienced these vivid, Technicolor dreams. They were as if presented by Cecile B. DeMille; they were Cinemascope, Cinerama, flamboyant,and bizarre. There were also some Hitchcockian moments to them. There was a lot of flying and soaring and falling off rooftops.
The only constant in all these varied dreams was my dad. He was the star and overbearing presence during each of these nights. In all the dream scenes it was me and my dad going through sometimes very surreal, sometimes very mundane situations, though all of it can only be described as truly cinematic and epic. The longer this happened and the longer I realized these dreams were going to keep occurring, the more I knew this must be important and that I must pay attention. Because it was lasting for so long and it was such a departure from anything I ever experienced before, I didn’t know if it would ever stop happening. These visitations, which are how I began to view these dreams, seemed to be coming out of some very primal need on my part. It felt good after a while, and I saw it as a way to steal back a little of the time with my dad that had been stolen from me.
I sensed there was a sort of mysticism, for lack of a better word, to the exchanges my dad and I had in these dreams. I was not a bystander in these dreams, and a lot was asked of me and being shown to me. Some of the dreams were explicitly instructional, whereas others were violent and unsettling. Some had some really horrific things happen; some were very languid and pastoral. There was this incredible cornucopia of experience that felt so real and more vivid than anything that was happening to me in my waking hours. I began to understand something intensely special was transpiring. I was getting this glimpse of some other space outside the materialist world of time and the brick-and-mortar world we know. There were happenings that were unexplainable, as
The only grandmother I knew was on my mom’s side, my dad’s parents having died long before I could remember. My father’s family was third- or fourth-generation Jewish Americans, originally from Hungary, but my mom’s mother barely escaped Poland just as all the Nazi shit started to hit the fan. She fled with three daughters, leaving her husband to come meet them later. Two of the girls died before she made it safely to New York City. That’s where she had my mother and my mother’s baby sister, Natalie. And although my grandmother wasn’t a particularly religious person when she was in Poland, because of the whole debacle of being ethnically threatened and shot at and her children dying simply because they were Jewish, she found religion when she got to the United States. Imagine losing your flesh and blood, your little daughters, to some insane global hatred? She became more and more religious as she got older. She was the reason why my parents insisted I get bar mitzvahed and all that stuff. My mom was not particularly religious, and my dad, although a true humanist, was a self-declared agnostic; he had a palpable disdain for anything religious. But out of respect for my grandmother, everybody kind of wanted me to go through the motions, which is what I did. And that’s all because she was such a great lady and commanded true respect.
I hung around with Mom for the few weeks before school started, but soon after I returned I suddenly felt like I existed in a surreal world, partially because one of the strangest things I ever experienced occurred. And it happened every night while I slept. Prior to this I never really had an ability to remember my dreams, but that suddenly changed dramatically. It happened for one full year after my father died, for 365 days exactly. Then it stopped, and I haven’t been able to remember dreams more than in snippets ever since. But that year, every night when I went to sleep, from the first moment until I woke up, I experienced these vivid, Technicolor dreams. They were as if presented by Cecile B. DeMille; they were Cinemascope, Cinerama, flamboyant,and bizarre. There were also some Hitchcockian moments to them. There was a lot of flying and soaring and falling off rooftops.
The only constant in all these varied dreams was my dad. He was the star and overbearing presence during each of these nights. In all the dream scenes it was me and my dad going through sometimes very surreal, sometimes very mundane situations, though all of it can only be described as truly cinematic and epic. The longer this happened and the longer I realized these dreams were going to keep occurring, the more I knew this must be important and that I must pay attention. Because it was lasting for so long and it was such a departure from anything I ever experienced before, I didn’t know if it would ever stop happening. These visitations, which are how I began to view these dreams, seemed to be coming out of some very primal need on my part. It felt good after a while, and I saw it as a way to steal back a little of the time with my dad that had been stolen from me.
I sensed there was a sort of mysticism, for lack of a better word, to the exchanges my dad and I had in these dreams. I was not a bystander in these dreams, and a lot was asked of me and being shown to me. Some of the dreams were explicitly instructional, whereas others were violent and unsettling. Some had some really horrific things happen; some were very languid and pastoral. There was this incredible cornucopia of experience that felt so real and more vivid than anything that was happening to me in my waking hours. I began to understand something intensely special was transpiring. I was getting this glimpse of some other space outside the materialist world of time and the brick-and-mortar world we know. There were happenings that were unexplainable, as
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