What Dreams May Come

I've never been good about remembering dreams. Sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, remember one, go back to sleep certain I'll remember it the next day, and when I wake up, it's gone. I've even tried keeping a notebook by the side of the bed to write them down, with the result being the creation of a totally indecipherable half-page scrawl that reads like it was written with the pen gripped between my teeth.

Lately, though, I've been having particularly vivid dreams, some involving my son, or my wife, or my parents. And remembering them, either because they're fairly scary - I had one of those nerve-janglers where your teeth fall out - or because they're epic, like a recent futuristic cross between The Road Warrior and Waterworld....the latter of which, coincidentally enough, was reportedly pitched as "Road Warrior on water. "

Anyway, this dream was set in some sort of post-acocapylptic America. I think a lot of the country was underwater, and lots of services were gone...it was all very bad. And I was in, I don't know, Kansas or Oklahoma, one of those non-descript states, traveling East with a bunch of other people. I have no idea how we were traveling or who these people were.

So at some point I got separated from those people, and I ran into my Dad. And I'm like, Hi Dad! And he said, Hi! And we chatted for a bit, and I mentioned my situation, and he said, well, I can give you a ride as far as Indiana. Which I think I thought was very nice of him to do. And then I remembered my friends and I asked him if he had the (recently purchased Honda) Odyssey -- which in retrospect is certainly an ironic name, given the dream and all. And he said, yes, and I said, see, I'm traveling with all these people. And he wasn't sure he'd have the room, and I agreed, so we sort of shrugged and said goodbye and went off our separate ways.

Later the dream shifted into more of a battle of me and my total stranger friends and some sort of either ruffians or government forces, tough to be sure. But it was the meeting with my Dad that struck me, so I wrote him about it.

My Dad explained the dream as a sort of "what-happens-to-you-when-you-have-another-little-person-around-who depends-on-you-for-everything" situation. The pressure builds up and creates delusional ideas of present reality. (As an aside, he was glad I told him about the dream, as it made him feel needed, somehow, which made perfect sense to me.)

So at a time when my life has something it's never had before - a son - not only am I remembering my dreams, but they're frequently of the apocalyptic variety. And one explanation for this is that I'm feeling the pressure of fatherhood.

I don't talk about it (much), I don't think about it consciously (much), and I don't even know it's there. But it is. And maybe that's part of why I started this blog -- to work through these things here, by writing them down, rather than keeping them in my head and maybe losing them forever.

There's another lesson in that dream somewhere. Ask family for help - that's what they're there for. (Although my Dad thought maybe he was on his way to the Indianapolis 500.) Keep your friends close -- think of them, and maybe they'll return the favor for you someday.

As for Jack, I know he has bad dreams; it's the only explanation for the times he wakes up wailing, out of the blue, for about 30 seconds, and then goes back to sleep. And the next morning he's perfectly fine.

Maybe his Dad comes to him in his dreams to help him out, too. It's nice to think so, anyway.

Walking With Dinosaurs

Sunday (mere hours before we all got sick, but I'm pretty sure it was unrelated) we went to the Denver Museum of Nature & Science to introduce Jack to dinosaurs. Oh sure, they have other things there....non-prehistoric animals and insects, space-related stuff, I believe some cultural whatnot involving ancient people the like, and that's all well and good too. But when I go to the museum, and moreover when I take my son there for the first time, you can bet my main objective is to bring him up close and personal to some massive creature whose fossilized pinky toe is bigger than his entire body. And so I did.

As kids, my brother and I were ridiculous dinosaur geeks, devouring books on them, dragging my parents to laughably bad movies like "The Last Dinosaur" and so forth (not to mention good ones like showings of the original "King Kong"), and drawing endless pictures of dinosaurs chomping screaming cavemen into tiny pieces, even though we know now the two didn't exist within 65 million years of each other. Well, unless you throw in time travel or The Lost World, but that's another story.

As an adult, of course, I'm still a dinosaur geek, somehow finding a woman, my wife Emily, more than happy to go on vacation with me to nowheresville Wyoming, Thermopolis to be precise, where we actually spent $100 apiece to crouch on our knees in the blazing July sun using tiny brushes to clean dirt off massive rocks that were probably fossilized dinosaur bones, although we couldn't always be certain.

So at the museum, there's a big ol' dinosaur skeleton right in the main lobby, a T-Rex I believe, unless the sickness has muddled my memory. I held Jack up to it and looked on as he gazed blankly at its ominous presence, his face devoid of any real emotion beyond, perhaps, simple uncertainty about where on earth we were.

We bought our tickets and headed straight for the elevator, since the prehistoric area was on the third floor. At the exhibit, we zipped past a lot of the preliminary stuff: insects, plants, the kinds of things dinosaurs crushed underfoot. After going up yet another level in an elevator about the size of the stroller - no joke, I thought the opening door would suck me into the wall with it - we reached the dinosaurs, and here I got the reaction I was hoping for. A friendly old guide had a tray of fossils, or re-creations anyway, including a T-Rex tooth the size of Jack's head, and Jack grabbed it and smiled and I made some joke about how much sleep we'd get if he were teething with something like that, and then it was time to move on. He touched other fossils, and we gazed up at huge skeletons and put our hands into fossilized footprints....it was all pretty cool.

Later I admit I got somewhat distracted by this video discussing the end of the dinosaurs, and the fact that the giant meteor striking the earth theory had only been conceived around 1980 or so. Since I was a kid then, it seemed to me it had always been the prevailing theory. Which got me thinking: what if they WERE wiped out by that meteor - and what if they hadn't been? What if the thing had missed the earth and simply passed on by? Would the dinosaurs still be here? Was humanity inevitable? I mean, we've been here for just thousands of years. Dinosaurs? My science is probably a bit off but I believe they walked the earth for somewhere around 180 million years. Could we really never have been, if that one meteor had gone somewhere else? Or would the cavemen my brother and I drew getting gutted by dinosaurs actually been us?

Our museum trip ended with a visit to the "Discovery Zone," which seemed to basically be a place for exhausted parents to catch their breath while their children climbed all over and ran around various toys, interactive exhibits, and play areas. We brought Jack to what seemed to be the proper age appropriate one, coincidentally dinosaur themed: you could build small, tricycle-sized dinosaurs by assembling wooden bones together. Jack and I sat there between the two sample dinosaur skeletons, handing each other bones back and forth to attach, and somewhere along the line while doing that I decided that everything in the world was as it should be.

Whatever Baby Has, Daddy Gets

And Mommy. In this case, anyway. So the reason there hasn't been a blog update in a few days is that Jack's rather nasty little stomach virus was visited upon the parents, and let me just say that Jack handled it a lot better than I did. Whereas he just cried at various moments, I spent almost two days in fetal position, crying softly. Perhaps it's the timing of the Olympics that had me recalling Nancy Kerrigan's "Why....Why...?" as I made the umpteenth trek to the bathroom.

Being sick is a miserable experience anyway, and it's even worse when you've got a busily crawling 13-month old and new dog to entertain. Or keep apart. Because Jack is fascinated by Charlie, and pursues him with a reckless enthusiasm that is quite troubling to Charlie himself, since Jack's playing typically involves pulling on Charlie's ears, fur, whatever. Charlie, however, isn't troubled enough to actually leave the room, or anything - he just gets up, finds a spot about 10 feet away, and lies down there. And the whole pursuit, catch, and relocation occurs again.

Fortunately Emily's sickness and mine were staggered somewhat, so whereas she was out of commission on Sunday afternoon and evening, right before I got sick, I was pretty much useless most of Monday, when she was starting to feel better. Until she got sick again. But prior to that she was able to take Jack to the doctor to learn to our dismay that he'd managed to get his second ear infection in two weeks. Which hopefully will be the end of it for a little while since he's only got two ears.

Speaking for myself, a little ear infection would be preferable to a stomach virus. Bleh.

Sick Little Man

Jack and I are always home together on Thursdays, but today was different -- he was sick with stomach flu. What that basically means is that he went through 6 or 7 outfits and I ran two loads of extremely unpleasant laundry, while I ran around the house all day in the clothes I slept in last night. Um, which happens very rarely. On the bright side, Jack himself didn't seem to mind ruining each successive outfit and putting on his little fashion show over the course of the day; it was all a big game to him as Daddy hauled him back to the changing table to peel off another soaked-through onesie, digging deeper into his drawer each time. The day concluded with him looking like something out of Hee-Haw, wearing a onesie that was a little short in the sleeves and some overalls I hadn't seen him in since last August. And the steady hum of the dryer as preparations began for us to do it all over again tomorrow.

Why a blog?

Jack moved to a new room in day care last week. Today was the first day I dropped him off there. I waved goodbye as I backed out of the room...his eyes went to me, the teacher, a plastic hippo of some sort, and a little girl running around with a giraffe toy in her hands. He didn't cry. I didn't either. Thought about it for a second, but closed the door with the conviction that everything would be fine. I mean, he'd been fine for his first year, in the old room, when he was a lot younger and more helpless than he was now. But still.

How can someone look so big and powerful in one room and so small and innocent in another?

Why a blog? Because I'm online most of the day anyway. Because I have all this thinking and writing energy that typically gets wasted on thoughts about who the next starting quarterback will be for the Green Bay Packers, what might have happened on the 4th season of The Lost World, and how the writer who follows Brian Michael Bendis on Daredevil will get Matt Murdock out of his current mess.

Because it will help my family and friends forgive me for being so lousy at staying in touch. And because I'm writing a book about being a Dad and my agent tells me I need to do one of these things to promote the sucker. So. Here it is.