dream sequence

Every once in a while I have a recurring dream about Joel. It’s not really a recurring dream as much as a recurring theme: I can’t find him or I am not able to get in touch with him. It’s not a dream that evokes fear or anxiety. Not like the time, sometime in the 3rd grade or so, that he decided to forego the school bus and walk several miles, all the way across Gainesville, to get home from school. I recall waiting out on the sidewalk as the sun was setting when he finally showed up, his then tiny frame strolling onto the campus family housing property as though nothing was wrong, with all of us outside, frantic. And even then, although I did have to call the police to tell them he had been located, there was an underlying sense that if anyone could survive and prevail, it would be Joel (ah, but you didn’t, did you?). There were more than a few of those times, as there are with people who follow a different path than the rest of us. It just doesn’t occur to them that we would or should worry. They are following whatever destiny is laid out for them and can’t understand why we would expect them to do otherwise.

These dreams, though, these dreams are an exercise in frustration. It is as though I have the sense that Joel is “out there” somewhere. In some dreams, I physically try to find him. I look everywhere, feeling that I will stumble on him at some point or will match his own unconventional thinking and deduce his location. And there are dreams like last night in which I try to contact him, by phone, through friends, by any means possible, and I am unable to get a message or line through to him. Waking up is difficult; being pulled from the search when there is at least one option you haven’t yet tried. I want to go back into the dream because the urgency to find him or contact him is unbearably strong.

Last night’s dream came after a frustrating evening and was preceded by 2 equally strong dreams- one of Joel’s dad, Jim, my first love and now also gone, and the second was a dream of the man who was probably the “love of my life”, still living but a relationship that ended as soon as it began and never was allowed to play itself out to its inevitable conclusion. And then the dream of Joel… I don’t know if previous “searching for Joel” dreams followed a difficult time, perhaps they did, but this was pretty clear. However, I think the significance of the “Joel dream” goes beyond a troubling evening and my own conflicted issues with relationships. When I left California, after Joel died, to pursue meaning and redemption in the middle of an HIV pandemic in Africa, I said I was going out “in search of Joel.” I obviously wasn’t looking for Joel in a literal sense, but for something deeper. Anyone who knew Joel would have told you there was something quite different, quite unique about him. Alex referred to him as “the most random person [he’d] ever met.” There was something about Joel… and then he was gone. So I needed to understand that- I needed to understand how something so unique (and in my eyes magnificent) could arise suddenly (and from such unremarkable seed), only to be gone again so quickly. I live my life as an agnostic, allowing for the possibility of God or something beyond myself, but requiring some evidence, something clear cut, a burning bush. I recall saying that I was waiting for the Dalai Lama to come to me and say, “and, yeah, by the way, we got Joel” (in the spiritual sense). Then I could believe. So this search of mine isn’t for Joel, necessarily, but for some understanding of the underlying essence of this all.

And then real life happens. I find a position, or a “friendship”, or a new place that consumes my imagination for a while and it is not until those things lose their luster, that the newness or sheen starts to wear, that I remember that whatever it is that has momentarily captured my interest is just not the point. I am on a mission that transcends daily drudge or the momentary elation. It seems the further I get from Joel’s death, the more difficult it is to live like that for any extended period. Then things that are not the least bit important take on a great deal of significance and I get sidetracked. So the dreams remind me that death liberated me, that there is so much of this that I just really don’t have to do anymore, that life is unimaginably short for all of us, and that there is something inside me that believes that meaning exists.

. And here is the rest of it.