Family

The last time I visited my father was in 2002. The last time I spoke to him was probably 2004 (I ran into him on the rail trail), and the last time I saw him was last summer (I took off before he saw me, so we didn't have any interaction). I've been avoiding him for a long time, and eventually he acceded to my requests to stop trying to contact me. So the letter I received from him a few weeks ago informing me of his diagnosis with prostate cancer came as a bit of a surprise. The letter was pretty short on details; no mention of his course of treatment, his prognosis, or whether the cancer was caught early. When I first read the letter, I didn't feel much emotional response to its contents. Mostly what I noticed was the fact that he'd spelled prostate wrong, and that his grammar and sentence structure were atrocious. Distractions from the real matter at hand, I guess. I harbour at lot of anger towards him, some of which is well placed, some of which probably is not, but the whole mess of it has long since grown stale, and I have other emotions and memories competing for supremacy. Nothing with family is ever linear or cut and dry. My siblings (who have also shut him out of their lives) and I seem to be of a common mind that we should at least send him a card to thank him for letting us know and wish him well with his treatment.

Unrelated to the above, I've been favoured with dreams of wish fulfillment for the past two nights. Wednesday night was rated PG. Last night: G. I'm keeping the details to myself. Dreams are a good road map to where my mind is, but they are ultimately just a map; they are not the territory itself, as I have to keep reminding myself.

Dreams, borrowed poetry

I keep dreaming about zombies eating my brain, or other sorts of B-horror monsters sneaking up on me and terrifying me. I've been waking up in a dead panic, heart racing. Usually, I can tell pretty quickly what my dreams are about, or if they are just random neural firings. These do not have the feel of random neural firings. I think there's a message here, but I can't see it. Which means I get to sit with it, stir this cauldron of images and memories, and hope that the meaning percolates to the surface.

Seemingly (but not really) unrelated, part of Mary Oliver's "Wild Geese:"

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.

Dreams

From Sunday night:

Some very peculiar dreams last night. One involved shooting up heroin. I woke up terrified of the health and safety risks involved, and scared that I'd never be able to give blood again. It was only after a few panicked moments of wakefulness that I realized it was only a dream. I think that dream was a reflection of overblown health concerns I have in waking life.

Another dream: I was at a banquet of some sort. It had a science fiction feel to it; perhaps it was on another world. I think the other revelers must have had a substantially different biochemical make-up; they drank alcohol to stay sober and water to get drunk. I remember wondering about this in my dream. I think I had a hard time finding my way back home, or to my spaceship or whatever, after leaving the party.