Memory Box

Anatomy of an Encouraging Dream

What follows is another excerpt of a creative nonfiction work-in-progress on the subject of sleep and dreams. Please enjoy and share recklessly!

In last night’s dream I received a bounty of late Christmas presents. At the brewery, again, where I used to work. Though I’ve dreamt often of this place and written about it repeatedly in these pages—particularly about the representations of bossness certain individuals I worked under have posed—this time the only supervisor present was Andy, who was in reality the managing owner during my tenure. We didn’t see him much but his signature adorned our (occasionally bouncing) checks. I don’t remember ever having dreamt of Andy before. When the presents arrived, he was the one I went to to ask, What gives? Who got me this stuff?

It was a busy time. I’d been presented with opportunities to buy well-located coffee trucks. The situation was fluid. At first it appeared I was being offered a real plum, then it appeared to be complicated in a critical way (the neighboring location of a competitor truck), then it appeared that maybe I could snag that one too and move it elsewhere, or rejigger it into a different kind of complementary business. This section of the dream was full of moment and excitement, dreaming within the dream of possibilities.

The article I remember best wasn’t wrapped so much as it was slipped into a black felt envelope: a package about the size and heft of a sheaf of printer paper. It was addressed to “McCheese” and had the word Homage written in light red Sharpie across the top. Opening it revealed a used game of Strat-O-Matic NFL Football, with lots of accompanying dice.

As everyone says now (a fact I think not lost on my sleeping brain): There’s a lot to unpack here.

Photo by Jonathan Greenaway on Unsplash

So far as I know there’s no such thing as Strat-O-Matic football,¹ but at one time Strat-O-Matic baseball—specifically its competitor product, which was called APBA (for American Professional Baseball Association, an endearingly poor name for a game, I think)—was a key part of my life. You just play a game of baseball with dice and cards for the players and big cardboard printouts of eventualities. It’s basic statistics stuff, with the most common outcomes of the dice correlated to the most common outcomes any individual batter would have against any individual pitcher. (One of the advantages to APBA and SoM was that you could pit the ‘37 Yankees against, say, the ’98 Yankees—but you didn’t come here for this.) Anyhow, when I first moved to Knoxville, Tennessee, in 2001, at the baby age of 20, in order to start a long-pursued career in minor league baseball, I knew no one and spent an inordinate amount of time sitting at home playing APBA by myself (it’s pronounced app-buh), listening to the Squirrel Nut Zippers and smoking cigarettes. Oh the glamour of youth.

A few years later, having abandoned that track and moved to Asheville to commence college, I embarked on a lengthy stream-of-conscious journaling project in which my stand-in, who’d just up and moved from Austin to Western North Carolina, was called Danny McCheese. The story behind the surname was…I can’t remember now, except that somewhere up the ancestral line one of Danny’s people had been influenced to change their name “in homage to a Ms Fromage” who’d performed some heroic act.

The dice appeared normal at first, and in fact they had six sides, but they weren’t numbered in the ordinary fashion. Rather, the pips leapt exponentially side-by-side. The result was a die that felt unnatural in the palm but looked cool, or felt normal in the palm but odd in the mind somehow. There was a fundamental alluring wrongness to them. Out of place, full of potential.

Along with the game my gift-givers had tucked in stacks of pamphlets on themes that related to each of them individually. These themes were niceness, weight loss, and conspiracy theories. It didn’t take me long to identify the anonymous benefactors: They were Logan, Zack and Tony, three guys who would become true and excellent friends but who I didn’t know from Adam the first day they strolled in to the coffee shop where I worked in 1997. Also in the dream was my friend Brandon, from even earlier in my life in Austin (my second high school) and, most bizarrely, a guy I worked with at the brewery named Alex. Alex alone of this crew was never properly a friend, but irl A. and I did try to help him find a house when we first became Realtors in the 20-teens.

The backdrop to the dream was a frank exchange A. and I had had the night before about my sadness. The sadness comes and goes. It’s subtle, not cruel, a tinging of the day. She can read it in me. It stems from the feeling of uprootedness newly a part of my life since our move.

But not really newly, the dream reminded me. Newly again.

The dream was comprised entirely of beginnings. In fact I presented them to myself in reverse chronological order. If you turn the dream inside-out and walk it up the causeway of sensible, experienced time, you get:

• At 14, having been expelled from Austin High a semester or so into my freshman year, I’m accepted into a group of already established friends at Anderson.

• At 17, working at the (new, second) location of a coffee shop in Austin, I meet three friends who will eventually welcome me entirely into their society.

• At 20, making the first move away from home, to Tennessee, having only for company some stupid game.

• At 23, journaling in Asheville (an eventuality that does not come to pass without the “failed” earlier move a couple hours west).

• At 31, segueing abruptly in a melted economy from a creative writing program in grad school and the head of a college class to a completely alien manufacturing gig at a brewery and a culture there that, though initially unconducive, will ultimately launch me—via an only routinely tortuous track (which included an abortive but not unmeaningful foray in real estate)—into:

• The independent adulthood of business ownership at 37.

Finally there’s the fact that it’s a football version of a baseball game I once loved, and a used one at that, with special dice. In reality, I’ve made the decision that, with our move, I’m going to disentangle myself from a baseball fandom that’s only become more ambivalent and conflicted with time. In reality this has coincided with an increased attention to what’s always been my second favorite sport. Move away from one centerpiece, find another one.

The dream was plainly reminding me of my history of plowing successfully into new places, of joining with and flourishing in already thriving communities.

It encouraged me to dust off the tried-and-true practices that have worked in the past: write, play, gamble something, invest. Those alluring dice tease the expanded possibilities that come with adulthood—more to risk, sure, but we’ve already done the risky thing. The trick now is to keep rolling.

It took pains to put the journal/journey—the one most substantively begun with the initial move to Asheville—back in my hands.

It reminded me through the odd inclusion of Alex that I have, in my day, even helped others find new homes.

It showed me that I’ve made good friends everywhere I’ve lived, and why should Fort Collins be any different?

It highlighted Andy, a man who in reality I last saw working as a cashier at a grocery store just to keep busy in his retirement—an example perhaps of openness to radical and voluntary change in one’s own station.

It nudged me to remember that the path of entrepreneurialism is full of dynamisms and rearrangements—that an appropriate posture toward it is openness to possibilities.

It pointed out that I’m essentially a new body now, sixty-pounds lighter, than I was several years ago. It pointed this out via its conspiracy of niceness. Not all losses are equal; some aren’t even losses.

And it arrived largely in the form of a late present. In fact we celebrated Christmas here in Fort Collins only a few weeks after we’d moved. It was necessarily light on gifts, owing to the new poverty. I woke up this morning honestly feeling like the dream was the best present I’d received.

To get to it I had to lift off an envelope of black felt—a black feeling, a sadness—and find inside it nested homage to a past built of one change after the next.

1. Of course there is.