I dreamt last night that my younger daughter Alice died an early death. I went to a place I owned into the country to grieve her passing. Then I woke up, wondering what in the hell that was about?
Frankly, I still don’t know, but here are some things that I’m mulling.
Alice is an eye doctor and surgeon. She came to me early last year in a dream and said, “I will never leave you.” I understood the dream to mean that she/God would see to it that I saw what I needed to see.
Some years ago, I began to associate my last wife, Patricia, with Alice. Sometimes, when I dream of Alice, I’m really dreaming of Patricia.
On my birthday in 2006, when I lived in my trailer on Little Torch Key, Patricia called late that night. We didn’t talk long, because she had called during a fifteen-minute break at work. It didn’t go well. I hadn’t heard from her in nearly eight months, after she had dropped out of sight. I pretty much told her off without being too terrible about it. I had felt like shit all day, like I was dying actually. It all went away while I was talking with her, so I figured it was in her. She was distressed to hear how I had felt all day, that she had caused it. Such had happened before, and when I was able to talk with her on the phone, it had gone away.
She said the angels had been really working her over, and she had been thinking about writing to me about it. I said I didn’t know how I felt about that; I’d probably have to get a letter from her to know for sure. I said I wasn’t happy that she was at work, that we didn’t have enough time to talk longer. We said goodbye. I fell asleep and was ministered to in my dreams by women throughout the night. It was wonderful, the best night’s sleep I’d had in years, and I haven’t had a night’s sleep anywhere close to it since then.
Maybe I should have acted on a thought: to invite her down to see how it might go. Maybe I killed something precious during that brief conversation. Maybe I our still-budding relationship. We had been put together by God, we both knew it. Such relationships are turbulent and take a really long time to season. She didn’t write to me. Of all my wives, I loved her the most.
Earlier the same year, 2006, I was told in my sleep, “Like but not greater than Jesus.” Then I was told, “Remember Daniel.” Then I was told I was going to be given experiences that would accelerate my spiritual pace and give me a chance to reach “escape velocity.” I then was told to enter the county commission race, running against George Neugent. The first of four successive races I would enter for elected office in the Keys. Experiences designed to accelerate my pace so I might reach “escape velocity.”
Daniel was the Old Testament’s dreamer and visionary who once got thrown into a lion’s den by a ruler he had displeased, but the lions didn’t eat him. Maybe the dream last night told me to let go of my resistance to going back up to Little Torch Key and running again against George Neugent, which (running for office again) I kinda view like going into a lion’s den. Maybe Alice’s dream told me to let go of going back up to Little Torch Key, and to stay in Key West. But then, maybe not.
I had a waking dream in the parking lot of my apartment in the back of Wyland Gallery on Duval Street yesterday morning. The gallery manager came by and said he’d heard I’m running for the county commission again. I asked how he’d heard that? He said he didn’t remember. I said I have not said I’m running for the county commission and I was not happy to hear him say it. He said I would make a good county commissioner, he would vote for me. I repeated my unhappiness. I said it in a way, I hope, that he understood I was feeling like Jonah, harassed by God, not by him.
Patricia has always represented my political activities in dreams, as she was the woman I was with when I ran for mayor of Key West in 2001, while living in a homeless shelter. So maybe it wasn’t Alice in the dream last night. Maybe it was Patricia. Maybe it was both of them. Maybe all of the scenarios I’m mulling are accurate. Dream language is very different from human language.
With God’s help, I will get to the bottom of Alice’s dream. Maybe I will be told I should have invited Patricia down for another try. Maybe that would have increased her and my pace, so we both could reach escape velocity. She wasn’t from this planet, either. And maybe I will be told my first race against George Neugent was only a beginning and maybe I need to quit being so stubborn.
Sloan Bashinsky