No morning in America as we live through twin nightmares

Recurring nightmares intrude and disturb. They are your fears coming awake as you sleep.

I used to have two recurring nightmares that made already restless nights more restless.

Once I understood where they came from, they went away.

In the first nightmare, which

I’d had for most of my life, I’m driving a speeding car at night and can’t put on the brakes. It’s not that the brakes aren’t working, but my right foot can’t find the pedal because either my leg’s too short or the pedal isn’t there. Sometimes the car is moving forward, other times backward, but as I try to stop it, I’m powerless.

And then I awake.

A couple of years ago, I was standing in front of my mother’s house when I remembered my oldest memory. One evening, when I was 3, my father was going somewhere and taking me. My pregnant mother and her best friend were talking at the front door.

After putting me in the car, my father ran back into the house to get something. I remember standing in the driver’s seat, looking at the steering wheel and being curious about the long stick to its right. I pulled it down and felt the slow sensation of the car moving backward.

We lived on a corner, and the car rolled through the intersection about 100 feet until it hit the curb across the street, filling the intersection. I remember looking to my left and then to my right and seeing no cars coming.

I heard my mother screaming as her friend, a woman named Bernadette, who would die young a few years later, sprinted across the street, opened the car door and gently moved me aside as she drove the car back to the house.

Remembering that evening decades later, I realized it was the source of my dream about being in a moving car I can’t stop. Since making that connection, I’ve not had that dream.

In the other recurring nightmare, I’m in a large body of water and begin to go under when I wake up gasping for air. It shouldn’t have taken me so long to figure this one out.

Many summers ago, I and a woman I was dating went swimming with her three children at the pool at the apartments where they lived. I should say they went swimming while I went dog paddling, which is about all I can do in a pool, except walk in the shallow end.

Walking carefully in the pool is what I was doing when I stepped into deeper water, my feet no longer touching the pool’s floor. I panicked, fighting the water with flailing arms and legs, my eyes sweeping across the pool, seeing sunshine and figures above the surface and carrying those images as my head went under, above, and under the water.

I had a sudden and frightening revelation: “I’m going to drown.”

At that moment, I felt small hands on my back, one on each shoulder blade, cool at first but then surprisingly warm. Those small hands gently guided me to the pool’s edge, which I grasped. Spitting out water and shaking it out of my eyes, I turned and saw the smiling face of the oldest child, 10-year-old Erin, as she swam away.

A couple of years ago, I had dinner with that family. Erin, now 27, didn’t remember that day, but

I thanked her for saving my life. Sometimes, the smallest of hands can do the largest of deeds.

I stopped having nightmares about drowning.

Recurring nightmares aren’t only nocturnal creatures, stalking us as we sleep. They haunt us during the day while we’re awake, disrupting our sense of normalcy, disturbing what peace we have and distorting our realities.

We’re living through two recurring nightmares at once: a corrosive and exhausting presidency, and a deadly and relentless pandemic. We know the reason for the first and, come November, can take the wheel and change course.

As for the second, we stay afloat, buoyed by a hope, or faith, there are hands that will guide us to safety and make the nightmare stop.