Time travel
Last night I had a repeat of a dream I’d had some months ago.
I dreampt I was back in Newburyport. It was 1991 again and I had to babysit for A. and W. at 5p. But I wasn’t 13 anymore — I was 27, as if I’d gone back in time, and the kids were 5 and 7 again. I was hiding in the bushes outside the house, looking up at A. and W., who had climbed a tree. I wasn’t sure if I should let them see me. I knew they’d recognize me, and recognize the fact that I was not the actual me they knew, but the me from the future. I heard their mom inside; she was in a bad mood, still dealing with the separation from her husband. I caught W.’s eye in the tree and I knew she knew who I was. I got up and walked into the house, I think I talked to their mom first but I forget what was said.
Then I talked to the kids. I explained that lots of things were going to happen in the next fourteen years — that their lives would be filled with some really hard times, but things would always get better. I thought of their parents’ divorce, their mom’s next boyfriend, their breakup, then her future husband. I thought of A.’s drunk driving in high school, his car accident after that, his academic trouble in college, his best friend’s impending suicide. I started to cry when I thought of this last one. I couldn’t tell them all of this, but I think somehow they knew I was trying to warn them of something, and in fact I might have been communicating all of this silently. We were supposed to go to their soccer game at the park, and I knew I’d see Jeremy there — A.’s wonderful, gorgeous and brilliant friend who, at 19, would become too sad to stay alive. Then I thought of his wonderful little sister, who would trade her best-friendship with W. for popularity in high school until they virtually became strangers. I thought of how she would look at her brother’s funeral, her face buried in her knees. Now we were all crying. It was terrible.
Why did I have to come back and warn them about the future? I just felt there was a need to tell them that there would always be hard times ahead, but they’d get through them and be fine. That’s what happens to all of us. That’s what life is.
The only really cool part was the sensory aspect of the dream — I could see and feel everything as if it really were 1991 again. W.’s short white-blond hair, how small she was then; her brother’s tendency to really cry when he got angry and stop speaking when he got sad; the way the sidewalk cracked on Orange Street; the bushes in front of their old house; even the tiny white pebbles from the fishbowl which we threw onto their gravel driveway when the fish died — those white pebbles stayed there for years. In the dream I noticed them again, checking to make sure they were still there, spread out in a small circle, and feeling relieved that some omens still exist, that my memory isn’t fictional: that we really lived there then, that we really looked like that and ran around and played in the street, not thinking about such trifles as the future, so mundane and unknown and irrelevant.
It just kind of bothers me that I’ve had nearly the same dream twice. Makes me want to scoop up W., now 19, and together go visit her brother in Vermont. I don’t know why.