Shouting in my dreams

Last night I had a dream with Father in it. This is the second or third dream with him in it since he died ... probably third. And I ended up shouting at him. I don't remember all of it: something about he wanted me to bring him some cookies, I tripped and dropped them (kind of crushing them) but then gave those to him anyway instead of getting new ones, he complained that they were all broken and crumbled and dirty, and I yelled at him for not being more grateful. It makes no sense, and in my waking mind I can see why he would complain. In my waking mind, the things I did in the dream seem petty and awful. So why did I end up yelling at him and not vice versa?

Of course, dreams don't have to mean anything. Or maybe they mean something altogether non-obvious. Sigmund Freud made quite a career out of arguing that dreams are all about wish-fulfillment. Robert Benchley once argued that "dreams go by opposites". Ebenezer Scrooge famously suggested that bad dreams could be caused by indigestion. It's hardly safe to assume even regularity in dreams, to say nothing of meaning.

So why is it that all the dreams I have had about my father since his death have been difficult ones? I wrote you about one the night after he died. There was a second, though I don't remember anything about it except that it was difficult. And now this one. What's more, the dreams I had of him before his death weren't any better: I've written about this one here, but there have been others and they all involved stress and conflict. Dreams may not mean anything, but it is hard to ignore the pattern.

Certainly our relationship had its difficult side. Often it felt to me like Father wanted to take over my life and live it for me because it was more interesting than his own, or at least that he didn't recognize clear boundaries between us. Other times it felt like he enjoyed telling stories that made me ashamed because he got some kind of charge out of the distress they caused me. It was always a commonplace in our family that "Hosea is very protective about his privacy" ... even when I was old enough not to care so intensely with respect to Mother or Brother, but because I felt I couldn't afford to let Father know even the smallest scraps about my life.

It wasn't always like that. When I was a kid I thought Father was just great, and I made myself a lot like him. He's why I "Talk loud. Laugh louder." Later, when I was an adult, we could still have long, entertaining conversations about stupid, pointless shit: English political history; famous movies (or obscure ones -- I think Father knew every movie that had ever been made); old Monty Python routines; anything that could be entertaining or exciting and that had nothing to do with real life. It helped if I had been drinking, but what the hell -- so was he.

But always -- always! -- I felt I had to pay attention to the conversation, to nudge it or steer it so it veered away from anything personal and stayed on neutral ground. And just as I could not absolutely prevent him from lurching onto topics that felt too tender and personal for me, so he could not prevent my blowing up at him. It didn't happen often -- more while I was a teenager, less after I left home -- but it always lurked there in the background. In the end, having a hair-trigger temper was my last defense.

Maybe Freud was right and dreams -- at least my dreams about Father -- are about wish-fulfillment. Maybe there were a lot of times I wanted to shout at him but swallowed it, and maybe they are all burbling to the surface, one by one. Maybe it's as simple as that.