Fever Dreams

Tumbling in the dark toward--could it be another memoir?

Plans to show up on Substack weekly go to heck when the grip of a flu overtakes your body and your mind. A fever doesn’t assist the mind to think clearly, but it leads to sleeping and dreaming. And there in the darkness, invisible doors open, and ideas tumble through the night.

It’s whispers in dreams, the sliding of images like movie frames toned in the amber hue of photos in the 70s, perfect squares with a tiny date printed in black on the bottom of the white frame. You see them slip by, the frames clicking through the years, stories only you know are hidden behind the sticky film. You can’t pull it back to enter the frames, but you wish you could, to go back and walk and live those moments again. Better. Differently. You don’t want to accept that those stories and moments are never to be lived again. The people smiling in the frame have left the planet, leaving memories and soul imprints only you can see. Stories only you witnessed and lived with them. If you don’t write the stories, all that life and curiosity, the mistakes and the moments of elation, disappear into smoke. Fleeting images contain long forgotten words and thoughts that in the night come back to life, loves lost and found again. Is it our fate when we are older to be left with memory fragments like broken mirrors? How do we bring it all together, these lived and remembered stories. Dare we?

Perhaps the mirrored fragments are stories that will be born during daylight. Perhaps not—only if the conscious mind agrees. But when your dreams take you there, you’re a time traveler and you blend into eras you thought were lost and it’s deeply meaningful, that life you lived. And framed in amber tones. You wear your size 6 hippie jeans and your turquoise necklace and breathe in the smell of the grasses on the hill above Stanford where for the first time, you taste the future, the taste of freedom. Only then you were crying because you had no idea what to do with your vision.

You approach that young woman with her long hair gone blond in the California summer sun, but she can’t see you. You want to talk to her, warn her. Perhaps just a kiss on the forehead would be enough. There’s so much she doesn’t know, and she will make so many mistakes. She isn’t ready to listen. When you wake up, you will ask yourself—do you want to join her on that hill? Are you sure?

The fever dreams begin to fade and through your eyelashes you discover you are a version of her fifty years later. If you want to enter those old photos and stories, you will have to claim them, walk around again in her shoes and see through her eyes. You will need to decide if you are willing to enter that liminal space and allow the words to come. Or perhaps you will wonder how you can stop them.

In this magic of memoir, magic of fiction dimension, anything is possible.