The Dream

A simple enough dream, really. Nothing too outrageous or illogical about the plot, this dream did not demand the extreme credulity of some (I am a fish, time is strapped to a spacial axis, powdered donuts with pulses and tender feelings), but played out in smooth, logical fashion: I was a member of the Detroit Red Wings whose success on the ice was matched only by my failures in my personal life. I was in love with a woman who, tiring of my inability to make commitments or decisions, had ceased to love me. Each time I went over the boards for my shift, the heavy syrup of this romantic disaster sloshed about in my limbs, gumming my movements. My skate blades hacked at the ice (the dull sound curiously isolated) to little effect, the hockey equivalent of dream-quicksand, as I tried to join the action.

Then, I woke. I think my son cried out from the other room. I'm not sure. Two cats were fighting in the street below me, and to my disoriented brain these sounds registered as police sirens, a party, a woman in prolonged ecstasy, a baby crying. I got up and paced, then came back to bed.

When the dream resumed the woman I had loved and lost was sitting in the stands, eating popcorn. I went over the boards and, stealing the puck at the blue line, glided in on short breakaway. I went high, the shot practically vertical and finding the top of the net just inside the post. The crowd went wild. My heart hammered in my chest as I scanned the roaring arena, looking for her, but she was gone.