The sun cut through the cottonwoods that surrounded the field we laid in during a hot late summer day in 2003. Your honorary uncles Mark and John were cloud gazing next to me, Andrew and Aaron were talking about something which involved baseball a couple feet away from us. The sounds of the Kootenai moving on the other side of the dike that separated it and Twin Rivers Resort in Moyie Springs, Idaho were non-existent over the songs of chickadees, the breeze through the branches, and the conversation of whether or not Brett Boone would crack .300. Soon, the warmth in the air reached its peak for the day and the pond just west of the field we lay was becoming more than just a dark, murky mud pit as the children who were camping, in a tent or in a recreational vehicle, descended down the hill to the dock in order to dive in and cool down. Out into the pond about 25 or 30 feet from the dock was a floating wooden platform that we referred to simply as the floating dock. It was constructed as to have four large pine rounds underneath to provide support to the planks of wood that created large enough of a dock for someone to get onto and spread out for a relaxing tanning spot or to achieve a decent running start for a good dive into the water and to aide in floating the large wooden square in the pond. From one of the corners descended a chain to the pond floor where a large tire attached to the end kept the dock from floating away. Of course, we had days where we pulled it up and placed it next to us on the dock in order to float around as aimlessly as we were allowed to float around aimlessly throughout our childhood. But today, we just sat. We sat on the dock with our legs over the edge and our feet in the cold water. We talked about the mini-golf we played earlier that day. We talked about the meatball Spaghettios we would eat later that night in the Stuurman’s camper trailer. We talked about the county fair that was coming to town next month and how we couldn’t wait to fill our bellies with elephant ears and Italian sausages. We talked about the girls in our school and who we wanted to go out with or just about who we thought was hot. We were going into eighth grade in our small town this fall and this is our life. As we sat there thinking about how a fish could come up at any time and nibble one of our toes, they came over the hill and back down to the dock. The girls. Most of them were a grade or two ahead of us and at this time of our life, we didn’t know any of them by their names but we did know them by their looks. All five boys on the dock stopped kicking their legs in the water. We watched. Towels were laid down first, t-shirts came off second, then their shorts slid down their bronzed legs and it was just them and a handful of colorful bikinis. Eyes were raised, questions of whether or not they would swim out to us were asked. The first, and fullest, dove in with the yellow bunny ear knot of her top and matching yellow triangle of her bottoms being the last things that I thought about until her blonde hair breached the water about ten feet from where she entered the water. Did I see her looking at me before she flung her hair back behind her? The others followed suit. A nudge was felt on my left side. “These are high schoolers, dude.” I knew, but my heart started to beat faster. These were experienced girls, high schoolers. We had talked about just this the night before while we slept on Aaron’s trampoline in our sleeping bags. And they were coming out to us. Us! The girl in the yellow bikini dropped below the surface again until her head emerged between Andrew and I. We looked at each other. My grip tightened around the planks of the dock. What would I say? What would I do? What could I do? She placed her left hand next to my leg on the dock, her right hand next to Andrew. A smile, did I see a smile? I sure as shit had a smile. Left hand left the dock as she floated and she pushed her hair aside. She was smiling, and she placed the hand back next to my leg and pushed down to raise herself out of the water and on to the dock. However, as she did, there were no strings around her neck and a bare chest was exposed to us. I couldn’t stop staring until I noticed the triangle bikini top floating in the water behind her as she rose and placed her knee onto the dock in order to help herself up. The bikini drifted along with the swirls of the water caused by her toned legs coming out, further and further away as it made its way back to the shore. Suddenly, I was in the water having been pushed from behind and when I brought my head back out of the water, Andrew was laughing. Why did he push me? Was he trying to impress this girl? Would I have done the same thing given the opportunity? I pulled myself back up, shook the water out of my long hair and turned to scowl at him. It was just us. Just the normal boys in our normal spot during the normal weekend of our normal summer. I glanced back to the shore. The girls were suntanning on their towels. A daydream. An average day dream of a pubescent boy. A stream of consciousness state where I was detached from reality, where I left where and who I really was and entered through the doors to an internal thought process of what I hoped would happen. It was not that I did not enjoy our time on the dock, talking about the Halo matches we were to play that night or the candy we were going to snag from the Hoisington’s shop back at the main office of the resort, but something made me dissociate from my day there. It happened often when I was younger. Many times, I drifted away in classrooms, imagining I was anywhere other than sitting at a desk and discussing The Scarlet Letter. Sometimes when I snapped back, I would remember every detail of where I was, every fish I caught on the jig with my father at Perkins Lake, every tree I climbed to the top of and viewed the valley I lived in, every girl I kissed but most of the time I shook my head, found myself back at my desk only to look at the clock and wonder what happened to the past five minutes while the teacher droned on. A fascinating phenomenon is the daydream and one that is hard to explain other than a loss of interest in what is around you allowing you to subconsciously focus on something else, a fantasy of sorts.

However, the dreams that matter most are the dreams that happen during the rapid-eye movement stage of our sleep process. There is no easy way for the average person rubbing their eyes when they wake in the morning to know how long a single dream has lasted after it has started but they always seem to end when one wakes. On average, an adult will have anywhere from three to five dreams a night. Freud theorized that dreams are a manifestation of a person’s true desires and anxieties which could easily explain a dream of a sexual nature with a lovely woman or man whom you have just met or why nightmares tend to attack you in your sleep with images, whether recent, recurring or from deep inside, that you worry about or are terrified of. In the later months of 1993, my parents took my sister and I to the local theater to see Jurassic Park. That evening started a recurring dream that I would have every night for three months and one that still bleeds into my dreams as an adult. It took place in the Holiday Village Mall in Great Falls, Montana, and involved my parents, my sister Kelley and myself running through the mall while being chased by numerous dinosaurs but mainly the T-rex and velociraptor from the movie. The mall appeared to be a hollow shell of what it once was, large liminal spaces between gated and vacant storefronts that were caked by a dusty film of what once was. This was odd in 1993 when the mall scene was flourishing strong with families perusing the food courts deciding whether an Auntie Anne’s stop was worth it if the children were already screaming for an Orange Julius, grown scrawny women chain smoking as they shuffle clothing endlessly through the Herberger’s for something special to wear that night for their man back at the trailer they lived in, and children rushing the large halls between the KB Toys and the 4B’s to their parents to attempt to squeeze money out of them to pay for what they wanted. But in my dream, the mall looked like how many malls look these days in 2021; desolate, more closed shops than shops open for business, a fountain still running but full of wished-upon pennies that had seen better days. My family and I ran and ran down the halls in my dream, passing locations in which I knew what store belonged there but were now in shambles. We ran up stairs, across scaffolding, around directories. One by one, we were picked off. First was always my father, the jaws of a velociraptor holding his left ankle as he flailed about before I turned my head back around and kept running. Then was my mother, dragged by something I could never see down a small corridor leaving nothing but a smear of what she once was along the ground. Kelley and I continued to run, neck and neck, not one of us would slow down. We turned the corner. We skirted to a stop. The T-rex was in front of us, looking down on its next meal. We would freeze in fear and the jaws would wrap around her first, engulfing her in total darkness and swallowing. Blood dripped from its jaws. All were lost but me, yet as I turned, a raptor stopped me from progressing. Cue a wake up, sweat damp sheets and panicked breathing. This was one of only two recurring dreams that I have had in my life. The second is a classic which has been dreamt by many people I have talked to or read about. The old high school locker dream, one has when they are years out of school. It would start as I found myself in front of the blue bottom half-locker that I had at Bonners Ferry High School. I check my watch and realize the bell is about to ring and my next class is to start soon. I fiddle with the combination lock but I can’t remember the three digits I need to crank to in order to unlock it. The numbers become illegible, and I look down the long, dark infinite hallways lit only by a light or two shining creeping out from under a classroom door. There is no sound but the worried grunts as I try pulling the lock off. The bell rings. Then I find myself awake in my bed. But most nights in my adult life thus far, I do not remember the dreams that I have had. There is a nothingness to my dreams now; I lay in bed next to you and your mother, close my eyes only to open them up again and rise. Another night down, another day to go.