My Father, in Twelve Dreams

One

As usual, only my father can save me from Mr. Samuel Tremlett.

This is barely a dream. Or rather, Mr. Tremlett’s stifling lounge room was enough of a dream the first time: the Looney Tunes cartoons on his shelves (video cassettes still in their packaging); the folding laminate table where he takes his meals.

My mother briefly appears, in the doorway leading to Mr. Tremlett’s menagerie, to say: He’s not used to being around children.

Mr. Tremlett is making giant strides, given his advanced age.

I clear the slippery linoleum of the kitchen floor and keep running.

Two

A moor—is it a moor? I’ve never been on a moor—at twilight, when the moon is high.

In the distance my father howls.

Three

My father retreats inside the treehouse to the kitchen, into a cloud of billowing wildfire smoke that pours from the hewed-out windows.

He still hasn’t brought me my burger.

He says, I’ll send it right out.

How do I explain to him that I want to go down and make love to the woman in the roofless bedroom at the foot of the tree, and that at this rate, neither the woman nor the bedroom will be there when I return?

There are things I don’t want to share with my father, even in dreams.

He comes out again, streaked with Prussian blue paint that glows on his hands.

He repeats, I’ll send it right out.

His visor does not look pink although I know it is.

Four

In some versions of this dream my father is able to escape the crate.

In other versions he stays trapped inside, pounding against the walls, which make a pure and resonant noise like a gong. The noise always pleases me.

In the versions where he escapes it is always when I look away.

One thing is constant: the crate always flexes, like the springs and stuffing of a mattress, when struck by my father’s fist. I can see its imprint bulging in the planks of the crate.

Comment on the Third Dream

In this dream I was aware I had been desperately afraid to ask my father for a burger. But this seems to have happened before I entered the dream. Or rather: it seems to have been in the dream solely as a state of present knowledge on my part, because how can my fear have had any existence preceding me, the dreamer? And yet when I asked for the burger that anxiety was not only lacking, I felt that it was gone.

Five

My mother is wearing a wedding dress, whitish-yellow with the lace colandered with holes. The train is intact, but the rest of the hem has been torn in a winding line around her mid-calf, exposing the house slippers she is wearing. She is about to marry Miss Coleman, my science teacher.

I try to explain to the priest that she is already married to my father.

The wedding is in the house where I lived till I was seven, but the reception is to be in Dublin.

I do not object to the marriage, per se: I simply want someone to reassure me that all the proper forms are being observed.

The priest adjusts his cassock. Look, he says. There is your father in the bridal party.

Comment on the Fifth Dream

Or was the priest my father?

Six

My father hovers in the sky—are these the moors again?—in the wide laconic circles of a bird of prey. In the treetops fronds of dense foliage part for him.

I am holding a gun. It is a gun the size of a pistol, although it has two barrels and is shaped like a shotgun.

In this gun, as I am well aware, once the trigger is pulled bullets fire backward, from the very tip of the barrel through the back of the gun.

I raise the gun to my shoulder, adjust the enormous sights.

I take aim.

Seven

My father and I are on a picnic with my next-door neighbor and my ex-girlfriend, who is holding a small fox on a white leash.

I tell my father, You are not my father.

My father tells me, You’ll never be able to get to Mexico unless you eat something.

Comment on the Seventh Dream

It’s just like him to want to dispute the terms of everything.

Eight

In this dream my father looks just as he did when he was still alive.

The fact he is still alive does not diminish this feeling at all.

Nine

My father does not appear.

But his presence is very strongly implied.

Ten

The strangest dream of all. My father is an odorless, colorless, tasteless gas, and I am running around the house, sealing windows, stuffing sweaters under cracks in doors, I am wearing goggles, a gas mask, and a crash helmet, because if I breathe him in—

Comment on the Ninth Dream

I was wrong to say my father did not appear. I made that mistake because of my own expectations as to the form in which he would appear, but what I ought to have seen was my father in the rocks, the seas, the snake-charmer, the scarab beetles, the flames rising from the moon.

Another Comment on the Third Dream

The question of anxiety still occupies me. Perhaps the felt anxiety in the dream was apt to mislead as to where the anxiety truly lies. Surely anyone else would have said the true anxiety the dream reveals was about sex: that being the anxiety I never overcame, preferring to use the culinary drama with my father to circumvent the fearful availability lovemaking can have in dreams.

Eleven

is the best of them, but I wake up crying and I never, ever remember.

Twelve

My mother and father: both are young, both are still alive, and my father is cutting his birthday cake, lush black hair side-parted, while my mother watches and holds his hand on the knife.

Later, they will dance a little on a gaudy rug to music from a stereo. They will both be a little drunk.

Some part of us loves our parents more in our image of them before we were born: in the moments we never knew them they seem more wholly themselves.

They dance now; in the corner a forgotten friend is hurling himself one last time against the skepticism of a girl on a couch; in another corner someone is picking up the empty glasses, to put in the sink for tomorrow.

I don’t want not to exist, but I want so badly for them to have it all back.

It is almost time to turn the music down.

There they are, as old as I am now.

Who will tell them?

________

Born and raised in Perth, Western Australia, Bryn Dodson is a graduate of New York University’s creative writing program, where he was a finalist for the Axinn Foundation/E.L. Doctorow fellowship. His fiction has also appeared in Westerly. He wishes he had a pug, or was a pug. He currently works at a digital agency in New York City and lives in Brooklyn, New York.