It had been awhile since I remembered a dream. I was starting to get a little frustrated. It was just last year I kept a dream journal for a solid stretch and remembered several dreams almost every night. “You’ll remember when you’re meant to,” I figured. Lying in bed for a few minutes upon waking is almost essential for recall. That can be hard though when you have to piss like a racehorse. I awoke Thursday morning and laid there long enough for a vision to bubble upstream into my waking consciousness. There it fluttered just long enough for me to snatch it out of the air before dissolving. A glorious one it was.
I have a habit of checking Twitter before bed and saw that postage stamps are being released in honor of Miles Davis. Anytime I hear or read that name, it triggers a chain reaction of energy pulsing through my body. A mournful, muted trumpet cries out in the distance. The connection I feel with his body of work and awe for the way he altered the course of jazz three decades in a row is profound. How many millions feel the same way? Of course he should be on a stamp. They picked a phenomenal image of Miles as his most bad ass self: knees bent, back at 45 degrees, bicep bulging, blowing full bore. I Tweeted about it and dozed off to sleep shortly after.
Sure enough, Miles pops up in my dream. I’m standing in a corridor and staring at a big, white door with a glow emanating underneath. I know Miles is about to walk through and I stand with bursting anticipation. The door swings open and there he is. It’s his younger, late-‘50s self and he is perfect. The suit is immaculately tailored, his hair is coiffed just so and complexion smooth enough to get him carded. We smile and greet each other like friends with a pat on the shoulder. There was something important we had to discuss but of course I can’t remember. I felt such a sense of warmth. It carried on into my day.
I’ve had dream run-ins with Bob Marley and Jerry Garcia much earlier in life but they were more Earthly. It was interesting how I was visiting Miles in an intermediary place just outside heaven. (Now that I see those three names together, they sure would make a transcendent band.) Other than the rare occasion of going fully lucid, communing with the departed (and maybe even taking away a morsel of insight) is the greatest gift dreams can offer. It would be nice if we could pick and choose who it would be. I guess I could experiment with more pre-sleep Tweeting. “Paging Mr. Hendrix to the white courtesy phone…”