Six years
after my father died, he reappeared and invited me on a mystical journey.
He did so in a dream, as vivid and
real as any REM-induced vision can be.
This happened in the rustic town of
McCall, Idaho, to which I had taken my family for an autumn getaway in November
2014.
On our second night at Shore Lodge, on
Lake Payette, we ventured out through a sub-zero chill for dinner at Steamers, a
nondescript hole-in-the-wall that serves, without fanfare, the finest river
trout and trimmings I’ve ever eaten. (My
dad loved restaurants like this; Coco Lezzone in Florence comes to mind.)
Afterwards, back at the lodge, I
warmed myself with a sweetly aromatic hot-buttered rum.
Just
before dawn is when my father came to me in a dream. He was dressed in black short-sleeve shirt
and black slacks—his regular attire of choice—and, uncharacteristically, a
golden belt.
He
wanted to convey a message of some kind to me; an advisory or warning is
how he couched his directive. He said he wanted me to go to a specific place.
The following summer,
after rediscovering this message in a journal, I tapped those words—Haze and Maine—into Google.
Nothing.
So
maybe it was Hays and Main?
I
entered the new spellings.
Atop
a page of hits this site stood out:
Welcome to Downtown Hays, Kansas.
I clicked into it. You’ll find it all in the Chestnut Street
District… including Main
Street. Hays—in Ellis County.
This
disconcerted me somewhat—in a good way—because, well, Ellis was my dad’s first name—rather, a name he gave himself, early in life to replace
the birth name given him.
Back
then, before the journey commenced, I was naïve about dreams, about the way in
which messages from the universe work. The journey, and its lessons of the last
four years, have taught me otherwise.
It
began with an Internet site that explained what I had experienced.
Deceased
loved ones can and do visit us in our dreams.
It is easier for them to communicate with us when we’re sleeping, that
in-between place between our Earthly reality and the other side of the veil.
It
went into enough detail to launch me, a few months later, to Kansas.
Ironically,
the route to Hays, Kansas by road from Denver, to which I’d flown, is called
The Golden Belt.
On
Main Street in Hays, this message awaited:
A mural of a giant sunflower with
the inscription For Henry (my middle
name, after my father’s father).
(I
did not know, at this stage of my journey, that a sunflower is the emblem
of spiritualism.)
Now,
a psychiatrist would call my interpretation of this message an “idea of
reference,” meaning that I was personalizing stimuli around me, a belief that
mental health professionals find troublesome.
But
Carl Jung, the highly esteemed founder of analytical psychology, in a departure
from conventional psychiatry, would have called this a message from the
universe—or, using a term Jung coined himself, synchronicity.
Suddenly, driving onward to Kansas
City, I became attuned to things as I never had before—a kind of heightened
alert, appreciating the magnificence of the natural world around me,
highlighted (literally) by a spectacular sunset while driving through Flint Hills.
Flashback: Just before departing for Kansas, my father had
come to me in a dream and whimsically teased me to another place; a
geographical location much farther away.
That message was based on a pearl of wisdom he’d once
said to me long ago (or so I believed in my dream): Take
the London tube to a station you’ve never been, any station at random, in a
borough of London you’ve never been before, get off, resurface and walk
around.
A third dream got more specific:
I answer a phone call from a man asking to
speak with my father. I tell the man my father passed away and the man accepts
this news passively and talks to me instead.
At the end of our conversation, he asks if I ever get to London because
that’s where he lives, and I say I do, and he invites me to visit him where he
resides on “Disney Street."
Upon awakening and recalling this dream, I realize
the caller was a dear friend of my father who perished in a 1979 plane crash.
I Google Disney
Street and discover that such a street (actually, a half-street) does indeed exist, hidden away near a tube station
called Borough—to which I had never been or heard of till now.
Fast-forward a few months later:
I am standing on
Disney Street, to which I’d traveled by tube-train through a station called
Borough.
A ceramics shop displays three skulls—the message?
Skulls
symbolize mortality and remind us to appreciate each day we are alive.
The road leads to Cross Bones Graveyard, where
medieval prostitutes were laid to rest, and which, today, is an extraordinary celebration of
their lives. Its gates are festooned with ribbons, rendering this place colorful and festive, to honor the women so poorly treated during their lifetimes.
Next, Southwark Cathedral, where an amplified voice
fills the oldest gothic church in London with a message:
“Find a piece of art
or music that encourages you to move along in life.”
I’d already found a piece of music—from Hildegard
von Bingen—that was not only moving my life along but also (I believed) keeping
my younger daughter safe from young-adult misadventures.
Later, over martinis in the hotel bar, I press Curt,
a good friend who had accompanied me to Kansas, and now London, for his take on
our tube trek.
“We were surrounded by death,” he says.
First: The
skulls near Disney Street.
Second: Crossbones Graveyard.
“And third,” Curt continues, “the Cathedral, standing
on stone slabs over dead people or walking by decorative tombs. It was all about dead people. The meaning for me is that I have to make the
most of whatever time I have left.”
I venture an observation of my own:
If so
much can be learned by visiting an unknown neighborhood and walking
around—Borough Market, Cross Bones, Southwark Cathedral—why not put such a
concept to practice at least once a month, maybe once a week, anywhere and
everywhere one happens to be?
Later, I impulsively instruct a cabbie to Motcombs brasserie,
the venue of my father’s last supper, and my first visit since his
passing.
A female barmaid with a snotty attitude provokes me
to turn my heel and hit the road.
As if my Dad was saying… You don’t need to be here, move forward.
