Dreams

My dreams are vivid and real. They are so real that sometimes when I wake up I am disoriented. I wake up and roll over so that I can kiss that beautiful woman and am surprised that there is a five year-old smacking me in the head with a toy truck.

A moment before she and I were alone. We weren’t even in LA, it was somewhere tropical and exotic. And now I realize that I am home and the big boy doesn’t care that it is 7 am on a Saturday. He wants to play and like all children his age he wants to play now.

He doesn’t care that a moment ago I was fighting a dragon and saving the world. The fact that two minutes earlier I was engaged in activities that are so erotic and steamy the post would have to be labelled quadruple X before you would be allowed to read it.

And he doesn’t care that a second earlier I was at the plate facing Randy Johnson. Two outs, top of the ninth and I represent the tying run. It is a full count. I fouled off the last three pitches and I know that this time he is going to bring the heat.

I am ready for it and as that little orb tries to dance by me I crush it. The roar of the crowd is deafening. I am receiving a heroe’s welcome. My teammates are jumping up and down and as I cross homeplate I feel them jumping into my arms.

The funny thing is that they keep calling me dad. It confuses me. Why is this happening. I may be a little bit older than a few of them, but they sound like they mean it. What happened to that fine looking woman in the clubhouse.

The downside to dreaming in Technicolor is that sometimes the bad dreams stick in your craw. Sometimes you wake up shaking and sweating because the thing that scares you more than anything in the world has just spent eternity having its way with you.

It is that one thing that is so frightening you cannot describe it. There is no name, no word, no way to give voice to the fear you feel. As an adult you aren’t supposed to feel this way and as a man you really aren’t supposed to feel like this. It is normal to be afraid but this is more along the lines of terror. In large part it is because you cannot quite identify what it is that is coming for you that makes it larger than life.

Those dreams are infrequent. During the course of almost 37 years I can count on one hand the number of times I remember having a dream like that, but they have taken place. More often than not the bad dreams deal with failing at something and letting the people I love down. Those are the dreams that leave a bad taste in my mouth and those are the ones that make me feel the worst.

But sometimes I have been lucky enough to enjoy the simple cure of getting hit in the head with a Thomas The Tank Engine toy. Sometimes forty pounds of joyful boy landing on my chest causes those dreams to be wiped from my mind instantly. Sometimes the playful smack in the side of head of a babydoll and my daughter’s insistence that I wake up is all I need.

So I guess that what I am really saying is that I need to develop a way to help the kids to distinguish between when I am saving the world and when their abba needs to be saved from the world.

Don’t worry, once I finish inventing it I will be certain to let you know. But is that really how you want to live, in a perpetual dream.

• Saved: Things About Jack