My dad used to say, “I don’t dream much but when I do it’s a real doozy.”

Now that I’m the same age that he was back then, I can identify with his experience. Especially that second part. The first part is not true for me. I dream all the time. Most every night, I think. I wake up with an assortment of disconnected and vague images that don’t make any sense. But when I do remember a dream, it’s so far out that I’m hesitant to say anything less they come and get me and put me in a straitjacket.

During the course of any given night, I’m running in slow motion and wake up sweating from being chased. I see people whom I know but somehow, it’s not really them. I’m living in a house that is mine but which I’ve never seen. Sometimes, I’m still working at a job that I had when I was a teenager but I’m my age now. I can’t make sense of the scenes that pass in the night. I know I dreamed something crazy, but I couldn’t describe it to you if my life depended on it.

Every now and then I do remember. Clearly. The dream is so vivid that I wake up and have to lay there a while trying to decide if what just happened was real or not.

Last night I dreamed that Beth came home.

You might think, “How sweet.” But don’t. It was actually very strange. Or maybe it was annoying. It could have been frustrating, or aggravating, or troubling. I don’t know how to feel about it, but I can tell you that it wasn’t sweet.

I know this because it was a real doozy of a dream.

Atypical of my inability to recount my dreams, this one came in great detail. I can still see it now while I write this down. The effect was real enough that I stretched my hand out to her side of the bed to see if she was there.

I was sitting on my end of the couch reading by the lamp when she walked into the living room. She set her suitcase down on the floor and held a jacket draped over her arm.

“Where have you been?” It was a legitimate question. “I thought you were, you know, gone.”

I should have been an emotional mess. It’s not every day you get your wife back. But there was no rapid heartbeat. No sense of relief. We didn’t run into each other’s arms. No ecstatic sense of joy. Just an average question like I might have asked if she had gone to town for the afternoon.

“Where have you been?”

“I went to Australia for a while.”

“What?”

I told you my dreams don’t make any sense and they make less sense when I remember them. Mom and Dad went to Australia once years ago. Maybe that’s where that came from.

“But I thought you died?”

“No.” she said. “I just had to get away for a while.”

“You didn’t tell me you were going. How could you do that to me? I thought you were gone, and by ‘gone’ I mean gone.”

“I’m not gone, gone. I’ve just been . . . away.”

“I don’t understand.”

If you want some interpretation, and we all wonder what our dreams mean, I can certainly tell you that there is a lot about Beth’s death that I don’t understand. For one thing, the fact that we both got sick, really sick, but I got better, and she didn’t doesn’t make sense to me. Even so, I accept the fact that even if I had a good explanation for why things happened as they did, it wouldn’t make any difference in the outcome. Not understanding, I guess, lingers like a bad dream.

Then, the tone of my dream shifted.

“Well how did you pay for your little trip? You know I canceled all the credit cards a long time ago.”

You see, it’s just like the husband to turn the conversation to money when he thinks his wife might be a little too free with her spending. This was never a problem for us due to the fact that Beth was more conservative with money than anybody I’ve ever known. She would hide away birthday money for years and never spend it on herself in case she needed a little emergency cash.

Add to that the fact that traveling to Australia by herself would have been something she would never have done in a million years. She never even owned a passport.

I should have known this was a dream.

“I got it covered,” she said.

It was kind of smug, the way she said it. I told you it wasn’t a sweet dream.

I got a little bit lathered up with her smugness. “Well, aren’t you just proud of yourself. Doesn’t seem right to me that you’d just go off like that and leave me thinking you’re dead. And just when I’m getting used to the idea of you being gone, you come home and waltz in here like it’s no big deal.”

I don’t think I ever used that tone with her before. I’m probably lying, but if it’s possible to feel something in a dream, I remember feeling ashamed.

“Well, I’m here now.” She wasn’t agitated with my tone in the least, which also should have been a give-away to my sense of reality. Meek and mild as she was, she could get worked up when she wanted to.

I woke up angry. At least, agitated. I reached for her side of the bed. I laid there in the dark a little woozy until I convinced myself that it was all just a dream.

I went a whole year after her death without dreaming of her at all. It kind of bothered me that my mind wouldn’t go there. Lately, it has become more frequent.

I’m not one to put a lot of stock in what a dream might mean. The hard-core believers might say that she’s just trying to tell me that she’s still with me. The analyst might suggest that I still have separation issues deep down inside that surface in dreams like this one.

I wonder what the analyst would make of what I dreamed when I went back to sleep. Something about driving a truck through muddy roads inside a fenced compound at night with search lights glaring at me from every angle.

There’s a whole host of theoretical conjecture about what goes on in the mind during deep sleep. Dreams are just the mind’s way of sorting and filing away all the stuff that gets stored up there. Sleep depravation makes the mind loopy. A good sleep restores our ability to function.

Yep, I still miss her. In a different way than at first. I’m not angry with her for being gone. I know that. And by gone, I mean gone. I’m certain she’s in a much better place than Australia.

So, what do I think?

I’m thinking, boy, that was one doozy of a dream.