It's not often that I dream of a deceased friend or family member. Not only was my subject departed, but this was the first time I dreamt of anyone coming back to life and not realizing he'd been gone. The following account comes from a dream not of actions or words, but of a lost friend, and possibly the need to answer a "what if" question. This dream was short - only a few seconds long - but quite vivid.
In my dream, Dave had somehow been resurrected. I didn't know how or why, but I knew it had been very recently. Sometimes in dreams you just naturally "know" certain facts, and in this case, I "knew" that it was definitely July of 2008. I was not traveling back to a time when Dave was still alive. This was also not just a vivid memory. In my dream, there was no doubt in my mind that he had died years ago, but yet here he was.
I pondered this miracle as we both sat in a tent, preparing for our impending Independence Day performance. He was oiling the valves of his tuba with that sweet smelling stuff he always used, as I did the same with my trumpet. He was making jokes as if nothing had ever happened - still a spry 54 years old and seemingly unaware of his newfound life status.
It had been five years to the day. I was still in shock, all of us were. It was as if God or fate or some unknown deity was trying to tell us that July 3rd was some sort of magical date. We lost Dave on that very day in 2003, after his heart finally succumbed to the ravages of 20-something years with juvenile diabetes.
For someone his age to contract such a disease was extremely rare, but he did, and yet he never let it keep him from living life. He was quite a talented musician, an avid traveler and boater, a loving husband and son, and from what I've been told, an excellent dentist.
Dave's most memorable trait, however, was his disarming personality. When I first met him, I had to deal with his sardonic wit, but the blow was softened by our mutual love for music and his aptitude for smoothing anyone's ruffled feathers. He'd had dozens of close friends because of this innate ability. Indeed, the only clue that anything was wrong was the frequent coughing spells. Near the end, he needed an insulin pump machine at night, and once he got that, we all knew it wasn't long.
Now here we were again, warming up to perform with our brass quintet. How did this whole situation happen? My mind was completely blown, yet I was also somehow calmed by his return, and ready to continue where the group had left off five years ago, as he seemed to be. In my dream, the "how" and "why" of Dave's return were baffling, yet inexplicably not as important as the concert we were about to play.
The other members of our brass quintet were already setting up on stage and they, too, were aware of Dave's amazing transformation. I somehow knew this, but I did not know what their individual thoughts were - in the dream I had only known about Dave's return for one day, and I hadn't had a chance to discuss it with the others face-to-face.
I wasn't even sure if we should mention it at all, especially in front of Dave. Did he even know what had happened to him? Was he aware of the passage of time? Did his wife, parents, or other friends know? I somehow felt that they did. This whole scene was just too weird!
To have a close friend get a life-after-death second chance was beyond comparable, and truly magical. Along with my disbelief of what had apparently happened, I experienced great joy and relief. This friend, who should not have been taken from our world so soon, was now back and ready to give music to the huddled masses - just as ready as he had been before. There were no debriefings, no astonished self-realizations, and no amazing accounts of existence after death; there was just Dave, as affable and funny as he'd always been.
Perhaps some celestial civil servant in charge of soul collection had taken five years to correct an error. Who knows? As we were about to leave the tent and carry our instruments to the stage, I somehow knew the quintet was going to be exactly the way it was five years ago. Everything would be the same - maybe because some part of me wanted to go back to that time, to travel the road we all should have been able to travel had Dave not died.
Then I woke up.