Rodney Curtis

In the dream, I was panicking. I had uprooted the whole family to move back to Midland so I could work at a small startup news organization with an uncertain future. Do you know those times, within dreams, where you start to realize you have no background information? It’s like you’ve parachuted into a plot of a long-running story and you’re supposed to pick up right where the action is.

We were in a rickety building that was crowded with people from my past. I was supposed to be the informal head of the household but really it was my wife. It was late at night; my job was starting the next day and I had no idea what I was doing. Very familiar dream theme there Rodney, -20 points for lack of creativity.

As I’m freaking out in the dream, I reach out for Marci’s help and she’s there comforting me. As I wake up, there she is again, very much concerned and probably ready to call 9-1-1. I was moaning and thrashing around in bed, in real life. And when she asks what’s happening I say I’m sorry, but I can’t explain. Then reality hits and I say, “Oh wait, that was really dumb.”

Instead of having a coronary, I was having a corollary.

Two Junes ago, my family was in upheaval as my 25-year-long career in journalism was being swiped out from underneath me by a horrible corporation whose CEO received an enormous bonus, several years running. Last June we all know what happened as, again with circumstances beyond my control, an insidious disease caused my family pain and suffering. My week-long hospitalization this June, well, you get the picture.

I think there’s some sort of post-traumatic stress factor working its way through my system now. Even as my sweet wife and I sat up smiling in the dark about the sillier aspects of the dream, I began to see the connections between a ridiculous manufactured nocturnal storyline and the very real upheaval that we’ve gone through.

One was drama, the other, trauma.

And here is where the connections are leading me. Here is where we’ve arrived. I’m glad school is so close to done for the year. My family needs — no requires — a break from the hard-charging push. But I think it’s even simpler. I think it’s what Marci was saying to me as she was waking me from the dream that somehow combined all our Junes into one, the co-seismic turmoils of journalism and cancer.

Just breathe. Take a deep breath. Relax. There is no elephant in the living room that we’re all avoiding. It’s just my family’s need to de-stress.

Although when I woke again this morning, instead of an elephant, there was a giant bear with a bunch of baritones in the homework room. And if you all can see this too, it means I’m reasonably awake and not in a bizarre dream world anymore.

Exhale.