I’m the One Dreaming

Dearest Rachel –

Sometimes, it’s weird having to come up with titles for these letters. I mean, I guess I could have just gone with using dates when I first started doing this, but that would give you no indication of what to expect, and that doesn’t seem fair to you or anyone reading over your shoulder. Besides, these letters are already digitally dated-stamped by the computer (or is it the server?) upon being posted, so there’s no need for the redundancy. Better to title each letter – even if no one would actually do that with regular correspondence – and focus on a general topic, however nebulous it might be.

But here’s the twist; this has nothing to do with any dream I might have had last night. In fact, I actually think that last night may have been fairly dreamless… although there was this moment when I found myself reading a Spire Comics-inspired Archie book about this past month’s World Cup festivities. Essentially, Archie (representing America, of course) was welcoming the rest of the gang over, and they were taking in all the wonders of the place. Betty, with her hair done up in braids like a stereotypical Nordic girl, was awed by the arboreal magnificence of the Appalachians (and filling her suitcase with ranch dressing; “why didn’t anyone tell me this is like crack?”). Jughead, with a white headband fastening his iconic crown to his head, played the part of the Japanese culinary tourist, devouring Texas barbecue and Costco rotisserie chicken with equal gusto, while offering his greatest respects for the hospitality he was enjoying. Dilton, as a tweedy Englishman (yes, I know the Brits coming over to watch the ‘footie’ matches aren’t like that, but this is dream logic), Moose as a burly Aussie, and Veronica as a southern European (I couldn’t tell if she was supposed to be Spanish or Italian… or Brazilian, for that matter) were equally impressed with some of the cultural institutions we take for granted (it seems places like Buc-ee’s and Waffle House, neither of which exist here in Illinois, are big draws for Europeans). Meanwhile, Reggie as the Canadian – in full Mountie getup in certain panels – has to be the antagonist, deriding his rival to the south the whole time, and demanding attention of his own.

Instead, this is more about an earworm or two that crept into my head; maybe not while I was sleeping, as such, but it was there when I woke up: Stephen Foster’s “Beautiful Dreamer.” I’d attach a video with the music, but it would be pointless; the lyrics wouldn’t necessarily be applicable, as I don’t know them, and they weren’t part of the internal auditory moment. Looking them up wouldn’t be worthwhile, either, for the same reason; that’s not what I was dwelling on in the moment.

Although… I suppose I could include the song I decided to put in my head to offset it (hey, you had your method of dispelling earworms – usually involving actually listening to the song all the way through, which I thought counterproductive – and I have mine, of replacement. Granted, my method risks just swapping out one earworm for another, but those are the risks one takes).

This one in particular has a separate meaning, in that it’s one of the songs I sent you as part of our mix tape correspondence back in the day, and references the Song of Solomon and Robert Frost, among other sources. I’m not sure that’s quite as important at the moment as all that, as I’m still trying to parse through the concept of dreaming, and how the idea of Foster’s song holds a different meaning than he may have originally intended, under our circumstances.

After all, there are sources, up to and including scripture itself, that speak of death as being ‘asleep’; as if the souls of those who have passed still reside here on earth, waiting for the day of resurrection. Paul speaks of that day in several of his own letters, and that the moment will be so fast that we can barely register it, whether we are among those like yourself, or still walking the earth (at which point, your resurrection comes first, but if it’s in that twinkling of an eye, will it even make a difference?) But in his description, he describes you and Dad and all those who have gone before as having fallen asleep, to be woken up by the trumpets’ call.

But are you asleep, honey? Or are you, as Jesus said to the thief on the cross, this day with Him in Paradise? Or, since you’re freed from the constraints of the linear dimension of time that we on earth are forced to travel in, are you somehow both at the same time? How does it all work on your side? I wish I knew.

Then again, I hardly know how things work on this side of the veil. There are those that postulate (because it couldn’t be proven from within, by definition) that we live in a simulation – not unlike the Matrix (the movie series with Keanu Reeves, not the computer that supposedly records all of the events of Gallifreyan history) – and that we are all just programmed characters. And the longer I live (and the more I deal with computers), the more plausible this hypothesis seems to be; our minds tend to recombine data from past experience to speak and act as if we’d been trained on a very large language model, for instance. Even the idea of being programmed sounds an awful lot like a high-tech analogy of Calvinist predestination.

With that being said, it’s possible that, not only are you not asleep and dreaming (although that’s admittedly a good way to picture it from our perspective), but when you come down to it, I’m the one dreaming; I’m the one of us that needs to be awoken from slumber, and see things clearly, as opposed to the muddy glass that I have to peer through for the time being.

And with that being said, honey, I’d appreciate it if, as always, you would keep an eye on me, and wish me well. I think I’m still going to need it.