You As a Symbol

“Who are the militia? Are they not ourselves? Is it feared, then, that
we shall turn our arms each man against his own bosom?” -Tench
Coxe

“Omne ignotum pro magnificao….whatever is unknown is held to be
magnificent."




I dreamed about you last night.
It wasn’t the first time,
and even when it was the first time,
I didn’t make anything of it
for its randomness made perfect sense,
or the only sense of nonsense
that I will allow my dreams to be.

But when you reappeared again
and again last night,
I now find myself having to admit
that you are a symbol
of something.
A something that feel certain I knew last night,
but seem to have chosen to forget.

I know I dream constantly in sleep
but some secret promise
I must have made to myself
is that I now blatantly refuse to recall my dreams in any wholeness
or meaning or light.
The reasons for it could be many.
First of all, dreaming proved to me how unimaginative I was –
my dreams merely became my stories;
therefore, I couldn’t take credit for anything.
Being too selfish to admit this,
I instead chose to become Unaware.
Unimaginative followed suit.

The more likely reason, though, is that
during the last few years
my dark dreams became progressively more
and too real,
too frequent to tolerate,
and then, when most raw and open,
in the most wonderful senses of the words
with the birth of my daughter,
I ironically found myself nightly plagued with the terrors of torture
about which I could do nothing
but cower and watch –
or worse,
unintentionally cause,
like slipping uncontrollably on mud in a truck
and crushing over laid out wounded soldiers.
Every night so much death,
so many mutilated men,
and everything felt like fact when I awoke.

So I suppose I made a pact with myself:
you may dream
as long as you forget.

But I do remember that I have been dreaming well lately
and, in at least a few instances,
dreaming of you -
which is further strange because we’ve never met.

Though I can’t remember you,
I feel that if I met you as a child
I would have loved you
openly,
though probably not obviously,
or at least I never would have made you aware
of the wideness of my heart.

The truth is I know somewhere inside of me
what these dreams,
what this childlike love,
is supposed to represent,
but I don’t want to remember
because, though it is simple and innocent,
it can and will
get misconstrued by me, by you, by others.

Still it is so nice knowing you intimately
without sight or touch:
knowing that you are good
and believing that you find me worthwhile
to spend time with every so often,
to share with me the things you think
without the complications of intention or strife.

I don’t know how it feels except to say
that when I wake
it feels like we are defeating the death
bad dreams are made of.

As a result, I have had fleeting moments of silly today
where I wonder who people dream of
and whether people dream of each other simultaneously.
I also have had sad moments
where I wonder if my daughter has nightmares
of frightening shadows
that she has never really seen before.
But I wonder too if she can read my mind,
and why she appears to telepathically know
when I soundlessly
watch her sitting in her crib
talking to a picture of Pinocchio
through the most microscopic crack in the door.
At these moments she will knowingly turn and smile directly at me,
as though I called to her
knowing before I do
what my next move should be.

Today I also questioned whether love in heaven -
if there is a heaven -
is even remotely close to what we make it in waking life.
And, though I don’t believe in “heaven,”
I do believe that I should teach my daughter that It exists,
even for those you’ve never met,

for,
if dreams serve to teach us anything,
I feel
that you -
as a symbol -
are certainly a symbol
of that.