dreams | Literature and Libation

Dreams of a Dad

March 6, 2017 · by Oliver Gray

I startle awake to the sound of a grunt and a meek cry. I drape my arm over the side of the bed to look at the time on my phone, hoping to block as much light as possible from the display. My head aches.

2:13 AM

Lately, I dream of my dad. He’s particularly annoyed with the car parts I’ve bought. Not a single night passes where he isn’t scolding or explaining; imparting, in his own way, how he would have done it, which is invariably not the way I did, in fact, do it.

While the dreams play out in a vividness as potent as waking reality, he almost never speaks. All our communication is nonverbal; grimaces, smiles, shrugs, winks. He’ll often walk some distance in front of me, leading, but rarely looking back.

But last night, he spoke. As he passed an hunk of metal under a spinning wire brush, cutting through 50 years of road grime, he said, “I bet you don’t even know what this is.”

He held it down to my face, so I could inspect it. I realized I was a kid again, standing behind the master as his ever-learning apprentice. The old dirt had given way to brilliant silvery surface below. Pretty, but pocked with years of neglect.

“It’s a brake caliper,” I said.

He smiled. An acknowledgement. I handed it back, so he could return it to its original luster. In that moment, I was as tall as him.

I wake again, this time to a more perturbed sigh and snort. I play the bed-phone-light game again, but this time accidentally flood the room with blue light. The bassinet next to me shifts and fidgets with the hungry wiggles of a newborn.

3:36 AM

Her mom is busy studying her role as Sisyphus, rock replaced by breast and pump. I go downstairs to grab a bottle. The cats barely stir as the fridge turns kitchen night into kitchen day.

In the dreams, we also rarely touch. He wasn’t one for hugs or physical affection in life, either, so perhaps it makes sense. If we do connect, it’s through some medium; my hand on a ratchet as I place it into his waiting, open palm.

But last night, he touched my shoulder. Standing behind me, in a flip of usual place, he reassured me as I torqued down the bolts on a cylinder head. A summer breeze swept through the garage. For the first time in a long time, the tone was not one of lecture, but one of acceptance.

She sucks greedily from the fake nipple. Her little blue eyes flash at me in the dim light, so bright, so wonderful, so overflowing with curiosity. I take the bottle away for a burp, and she screams, but then settles.

Normally, she doesn’t speak, but this morning, she coos and goos a chorus of baby questions.

Normally, she doesn’t touch me, but this morning, her tiny little hands wrap my fingers with a vice grip.

She may never meet her grandpa here, but part of me knows she’s already met him there.

She snuggles into my shoulder a little, drunk on milk and midnight dark.

Beer Review: Left Hand Wake Up Dead Nitro

April 10, 2014 · by Oliver Gray

Apprehension settles in right around dusk. Shadows stretch for the long night ahead, laying a blanket down for some giant nocturnal picnic. In one last show of radiant glory, the sun slides into the horizon like bread into a toaster, continuing its never-ending journey to cook the planet to perfect brownness.

But the sun’s exit, stage West, heralds the time where I can’t continue my fight against sleep. Eventually, I’ll have to lie down, close my eyes, give into the merciless machinations that cobble themselves together in the flutters of my REM. Eventually, the dreams will come, and with them all those fiendish imps of imitation and devils of deception.

Every night for nearly 8 months now, I go to sleep only to wake up somewhere else, in a blurry pseudo-reality that’s simultaneously vivid and ethereal. Memories move like phantasms, fragments of what they should be, broken pieces of things I recognize, sewn together by my mind into a quilt of mismatched nostalgia. The rules of chronology abandoned, places and ages defy logic, and I’m with people in dream that I can’t be with in sun-soaked waking hours.

Every night I spend hours with my dad, chatting with him like nothing has changed, and every bitter morning I have to wake to that chest-tightening reality that it was only a dream. Of late our chats turn dour; he’s disappointed in how I’m handling things in his corporeal absence, chiding me for not stepping up, being the man he raised and expected me to be. The joy of seeing his mischievous smile quickly falls away to his ever-present disappointment and my ever-present guilt.

I know, rationally, it’s just my stress manifesting, snarling at me from behind an unforgivingly efficient cerebellum, but that doesn’t make the daily ritual of returning to dadless reality any easier to suffer. I know that dreams are not reality, but the lanes shift too often; so often that I start to wonder how real or unreal a dream really is when it pounds so insistently on the door to my psyche, even when I’m awake.

I’ve tried to fend off the dreams by running until my legs surge lactic acid, reading until my eyes burn with fatigue, even, despite acute awareness of the dangers inherent, drinking in hopes that a few quaffs from the silky sweetness of late night stout might offer respite and nepenthe from memories relentless.

But even a drink doesn’t lessen the pain. If anything my indulgence heightens the haunt, makes the sadness palpable, going up as the contents of the glass goes down. Counter to my hopes, it does nothing to inject some subtle nitrogen into brain, nothing to smooth out the harsh edges of my fear of falling asleep.

I always imagined ghosts being more tangible, something more inline with the white sheets and wispy mists of childhood fancy. I’d convinced myself that if lingering spirits existed, they could be caught on film, captured by technology and those brave enough to actively seek them. I never expected the supernatural to be homegrown in the garden of my imagination.

It turns out that ghosts are made of memories, flashbacks that flirt with your peripheral vision during the day, and only come out to play as full bodied apparitions once your body has given up for the day. They exist there, just as real as when they existed here, brought back to life by the power of your mind.

Every night, for 8 months now, I’ve dreamed dreams I don’t want, but can’t escape.

Every night, for 8 months now, I wake up dead.

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” ― Edgar Allan Poe

Review: Troegs Dream Weaver Wheat

May 29, 2012 · by Oliver Gray

To avoid getting into the boring minutiae of what I do for eight to nine hours a day, everyday, let’s just say I’m a technical writer who works with Microsoft SharePoint.

For those of your unfamiliar with the program, it is an online collaborative work environment that multiple users can access from any location to simultaneously work on documents. It has fancy document tracking, versioning, permissions structures, and other built-in tools to share information across a large team in one centeralized location.

To simplify even further, it is a digital, online library. That makes me the gatekeeper; the curmudgeony librarian who lords over all the files (books) like a ruthless bookish dictator. Those who require access to our proprietary, corporate lore must first come to me. I hold the keys to the kingdom, for this kingdom was built on Word documents and Excel spreadsheets.

I got into SharePoint because of my background in web design. I’ve always been a hobbyist designer. I find (good) websites aesthetically rewarding. I taught myself HTML in 7th grade to make a Pokemon website. I was that cool.

As I got more involved in designing the webs like some hippy art-school spider, I upgrade from writing tags in Notepad to using GUI based software. My first program was Adobe GoLive!, which in retrospect, was a pretty impressive HTML generator for its time. I then upgraded to FrontPage, as I got it for free in some weird MSDN bundle.

But then, while taking a graphic design class in high school, I came across Macromedia Dreamweaver.

This software changed my life. I finally had a tool to literally create my web-based dreams, wrapped in a pretty green icon and an easy to use interface. All of my early websites were built using an old version of Dreamweaver. The earliest roots of my now blossoming career started on a split design/code screen, packed to the brim with inline font formatting and poorly placed <ul> tags.

So when I look at this delicious wheat beer, a jewel in the crown of Troegs Brothers Brewing Company, I think of my hobbies. I think of what I am passionate about, and how far I’ve come since my Maddox-esque Geocities rant site named, “The Afterword.”

When I sip this light, crisp, but heavily wheated beer, I’m reminded of my life-long goals, and how much progress I’ve made towards attaining them. When I look through its opaque orange hue, I’m reminded of the glow of my youth, and the bright, but unclear future ahead.

When I see Dream Weaver on the label, I’m reminded of that program sitting idle on my desktop. I’m reminded that I have shit to do, and a place to do it.

Look out internet, I’m armed with beer and a WYSIWYG device. You have been warned.

9 out of 10.

The stuff dreams are woven of.

Next up: Gordon Biersch Blonde Bock!