Last Night's Dream

Generally my dreams concern routine, boring actions like buying tires or doing taxes, but last night was an exception.

The phone rang, and I instantly recognized the voice as Marv, my friend who died last May. He said something like, "I was thinking about our discussion about yadayada..." It was common for us to continue previous conversations like that, so the only thing out of the ordinary was that he had been dead for eight months. When he stopped talking I said, "Well, if you can use the phone in the Afterlife, you can probably just come on over, " and he agreed to stop by the house.

As is common in dreams, my house didn't look anything like any house I ever lived in. It was multiple stories with an open stairway, so you could see people traveling between floors. It was from that vantage point that I saw Marv coming up to the floor I was on, but he wasn't moving with a walking motion. He was gliding up not so much like a ghost but more like a person on an escalator. In fact, the scene looked like a department store even though it was my home.

Marv didn't resume our phone conversation. He just settled down on the floor in a corner and watched the other people who had also come by the house. There was music playing as there usually is when we have visitors, and the song had a traditional country feel like bluegrass. I started dancing by myself in an old fashioned style like a hoe-down, and the dream pretty much ended. When I awoke I reviewed in my mind some details, especially Marv's appearance, because I knew Pam would be interested. He was younger looking than I had ever seen him alive, like he may have looked in his early 30's. His hair was dark without any gray and he was slimmer.

Pam has said that she envisions Marv's continued presence as sitting on a couch with her father and the two deceased men look down on we-the-still-living and criticize and laugh at our actions. George is drinking beer, and Marv is smoking marijuana. Maybe Marv settling down silently in a corner of my house in my dream is a similar vision that he is still with us.