What dreams may come

With a four month-old son, I haven’t had much time for movies. And since movies are one of my favourite things, I’ve taken to reading film scripts online. Something the experience has over watching movies is you get to read the occasionally stunning piece of prose like this opening description of the dilapidated mansion in Sunset Boulevard: “It is grandiose and grim. The whole place is one of those abortions of silentpicture days, with bowling alleys in the cellar and a built-in pipe organ, and beams imported from Italy, with California termites at work on them.”

In the absence of movies, dreams can become a valuable source of visual entertainment. And since Gus’s birth, I’ve been dreaming up a storm. In this evening’s feature presentation, I’ve located a room behind my parents’ bedroom. It’s a small chamber with a two-way mirror looking onto their bed. In the dream, the things I’m about to see are more amazing than anything that can be glimpsed through a telescope. I’m about to learn who they really are.

As they look at each other and begin to talk I worry that this might be a terrible mistake. And it’s in that moment of doubt that I see them turn to gaze directly at me. I tell myself that, because they’re looking at a two-way mirror, they are only gazing into their own eyes. I then realize that I’m looking through a window and not a two-way mirror at all.

I awaken from the dream. Since Emily is out with Gus, I phone Marie-Claude to discuss it. “It’s 11 a.m.,” she says. “Why are you still dreaming?” I tell her a writer’s dream life is an imaginative labour that fuels creation. In response, she tells me to get off my duff. “I have a doozy of a duff,” I say indignantly. “Especially in the buff.”

Marie-Claude suggests that maybe my subconscious is telling me to phone my parents. It has been a while. I pick up the phone and call. My mother answers. My father is out having his cholesterol checked. “When’s the last time you had yours checked?” she asks. I really can’t recall. She tells me she hopes I’m not eating french fries. She tells me I don’t need to make my son an orphan.

After putting down the phone, I stop to imagine what my heart attack would look like. It would be the kind of heart attack that friends would laughingly imitate in the kitchen during my shiva. “He’ll finally be able to rest his duff forever more,” Marie-Claude will say as the credits begin to roll.