The dream of two nights ago.  Saturday night.

I dreamed that two friends brought me home from eating out.  Mike and his wife who I don’t do that kind of socializing with, and even in the dream, I thought how nice it was that I was getting to know Mike’s wife.  But these are Madison friends and they took my home to the Indy house on Washington Boulevard.  Mike’s wife admired the house and I asked her to come in saying something about how they had never been inside the house.  

After they saw the first floor, Mike made some comment about liking something and then said that they had to leave.  I walked them to the front door, pointing out the storm door that David had made to fit the front door that came to a point on the top.  I went to the porch and noticed that there were a lot of people outside in the long drive way.  Sort of lining up in a loose way.  Some of the people were short character actors, some kinda ugly, and some were young men in tails and top hats.  One of the young men in tails was making fun, sarcastic remarks about the movie that David was making in the backyard.  I was not surprised about the movie, taking its existence in stride, but I was furious about the over heard remark.  I set on the guy like a wild mama bear.  I told him that if he didn’t like the work or respect the filmmaker that he should leave.  I told him that “we” did not need any negative vibes during the making of this film and that his opinion had not been asked for and was not wanted.  I did not fire him -- he who I knew was an extra for some musical number -- but yelled at him as if that would have been the most logical final line.  

Then, I went in to the back yard and sure enough David was making a movie.  It was David but he was pale and gaunt.  I had never seen him that way.  David looked very much like his father and as his father got older he became rounder.  David was never round and although I guess I expected him to look like his father when he was old, perhaps he would have taken after his mother and her side of the family and stayed relatively slender.  Of course, his mother died at the same age that David did and so I have no idea what she would have looked liked as an old woman.  

David had the stubble of a few days without shaving and there was more grey in it than I had seen before.  We talked.  I took both of his hands in a particular way that we held hands together.  I may have taken the bottom of his face in my hands.  I don’t remember anything that we said but it was unremarkable -- a hello after a day away, a few words between takes.  He had to get back to work and I went to sit down and watch the work.  What I saw was a collage of images -- live actors working with a camera and sound crew working, rough cuts of a day’s work, partially finished images with some imagined background moving about, and a finished film.  I knew that what I was watching had to be a dream because the experience was too overlaid with multiple experiences to be reality.

Then I woke up.  

I was struck by two things -- that our Indianapolis house is now something of my dreams.  I have often dreamed of the houses I lived in with my family of origin as a child, but more frequently the house of my very young years and not the one I was a teenager in.  I can’t remember the last time I dreamed of a place I lived in with David, or without him for that matter.  I have more often dreamed of imagined houses and apartments.  I felt that our Indianapolis home has passed into something like a myth, an imagined place, a place held inside but no longer real.

And then, that David would not be the old man of the dream, and that I would never know what he would look like as an old man.  It was not the sadness of grief that struck me but the sadness of a missed opportunity.

And then I wondered if we had done this, made some kind of multi-layered film art experience in some other place.  At some other time.  And that wondering stuck with me throughout the day.