The Sound of my Dreams

            I woke to the sound of thunder rattling the windows and the echoes of my own advice in my dreams. It was exceedingly dark in my apartment, flecked with the occasional flash of lightening through the windows. I was asleep on the couch. It seems I’ve been sleeping there a lot lately. I sat up and oriented myself through the darkness when I remembered the dream.

             I was crying and sitting with a blind young woman in a living room I didn’t recognize. This strawberry blonde haired blind girl was terribly upset about something and I was trying to comfort her. I said to her, “It isn’t about the things you have but the bunches of people you have”.  I’m confident that she smiled at that, but it was hard to tell through the tears. In the background was the sound of burning and crackling wood in a fire place. Our shadows seemed to dance on the walls in the flickering firelight.

             She was a very beautiful woman and I could see there was a pure and tender softness about her. I don’t know what our relationship was really. I couldn’t tell if we were intimates or just friends. I think I wanted or at least hoped we were intimates. We did seem to be very close though.  I had the strange feeling that we once held hands or at least gently caressed each other fingers through some other night, when the windows rattled and rain pelted the glass.

             I lit a cigarette and tried to remember more details from the dream. The thunderstorm twisting its way outside was a distraction and I started to lose my hold on the dream. I started to lose her. By the time I finished my smoke her face was nothing but a blurry remembrance. An unfocused collection of all the faces of the woman I’ve loved or want to lavish my love upon.  

             I lay back down on the couch and listened to the rain fall. I realized that my eyes were still wet from the dream tears. I wondered what we had been crying about in the dream. I wondered if my advice, my words of comfort reached her in any real way. Then I remembered again that it was a dream and maybe I was trying to give myself some advice. I thought that in a lot of cases, when we dole out advice to people it’s usually the very thing we need to hear ourselves.

             Another blast of thunder from the skies outside and I felt a rumble through the couch. My eyes shut and I fell back to sleep.