Minority Report

I dream often of a man I knew more than thirty years ago. When I say “knew,” that is not accurate; I barely I than thirty years ago. When I say “knew,” that is not accurate; I barely knew him at all.

- Mary Gaitskill

But my dreams of him are dreams of intimacy beyond what I usually mean by “knowing.” They are erotic dreams even when they are not about sex. That sounds romantic but it is not. The dreams are terrible and disgusting. Or they are banal. I cannot explain them. Even when they are affectionate and tender, the sweetness strikes a weak note amid the dominant noise and adds to my fading impression of a bewildered pain that must, for some reason, be accepted. Sometimes I go for as long as a year without having one of these dreams and I think they are gone. And then they start again.

I am now well over fifty years old. I am alone, but I have had relationships, including a common-law marriage that just recently ended. I dreamed of him, the man from long ago, through all my previous relationships. These dreams of him—and thoughts, I have also had thoughts and memories triggered by things as random as a singer’s voice or the subplot of a TV show or a movie or even a cartoon—are like a weather system passing across the distant horizon of my outermost self, but they affect the local barometric pressure and the color of the shared sky.