Bed by Day

In winter I get up at night
And dress by yellow candle-light.
In summer, quite the other way,
I have to go to bed by day.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, Bed in Summer

I’ve had debilitating migraines since I was ten years old, a curse I share with the grandmother I never met, who ended her life 13 years before I was born. Years of attempted treatment have yielded scant relief: some pills that took the edge off when I was in high school but carried a dangerously high risk of eventual stroke, declined prescriptions for psychotropic drugs off-label whose effects I very much fear(ed), and a recent recommendation of Topomax, which I was strongly considering before realizing it functions by interrupting normal brain activity, which just didn’t sound like a match for me. As Hemingway famously quipped of the electro-convulsive treatments that hastened his suicide: “It was a brilliant cure, but we lost the patient.”

So I am left managing my migraines, in part with the help of insights from books like this. There are predictable triggers: fluorescent lights are the worst, but also not eating consistently, extreme glare from sunlight, significant drops in the barometer, and possibly some foods. Caffeine has long been a double-edged sword. When I started drinking coffee regularly as a teen, my migraine incidents dropped precipitously. Indeed, my grandmother would immediately drink a Coke when hers started. But as the book linked above notes, the trouble with caffeine is its addictive property that inclines one toward having more and more. (Indeed, I was drinking coffee with every single meal for much of my 20s.) Any medicine is best delivered in a consistent dose at consistent times, a case I was trying desperately to make to my dad about his anxiety medication in his final weeks, with some periodic success. And so I’m down to a large dose of coffee each morning, leaving me only a little bit wistful as others indulge in an after-dinner cup at special meals out. I’ve also developed a potentially worrisome naproxen sodium (Aleve) habit, my current intervention for an ongoing migraine. Worrisome because it can carry cardiac complications after long-term use. Especially worrisome in light of my father’s recent aortic aneurysm.

This is all a preamble to saying that my one thing yesterday was crawling into bed before dinner, just after wrapping up work, in the waning afternoon hours of resplendent sunshine on a mid-July day in a climate-change summer. I’d been nursing a migraine all day while trying to catch up with two weeks of missed work, and this ill-advised practice left me in ultimately and predictably worse shape. I snoozed fitfully for close to three hours, stirred to eat, call my mother, and read a bedtime story to my child, then returned to bed to dream.

Ay, there’s the rub. I normally get by on six hours a night, a compromise from a youth spent pulling chronic all-nighters and otherwise aiming for four hours, itself the product of both a busy schedule and a lifetime of nightmares prompting me to craft my sleep in such a way as to avoid them. But the consequence of a night spent trying to sleep and ultimately procuring well more than eight hours of rest is a floodgate of deferred dreams. And there was one in particular that was extensive, vivid, memorable, and affecting.

In it, my dad came back to life.

The setting for the dream initially was true to real life: I was on the phone when my father collapsed, still listening when the paramedics declared him dead to my mother. I flew home in a frenzy but, in the nature of dreams, this was more akin to teleportation than the agonizing 16-hour 4-city odyssey I actually traversed. When I arrived home, I found him convalescing in my parents’ bed, faintly breathing through snores and very much alive. He awoke sometime later to explain that yes, he had collapsed, and yes, he had seemed to be dead, but after the paramedics had receded and the hubbub reduced, he had sat up and asked my mother what happened.

The rest of the dream went on for days of relatively normal activity. We went to movies, ate at restaurants, took strolls around the neighborhood. And talked, oh how we talked. He made jokes and observed insights and we frequently marveled at what a scare we’d all endured, how precious life was and how committed he was to enjoy it. The only conflict in these dreams came when he attempted something too strenuous, at which point both my mother and I intervened to encourage rest, slowness, he’d only just now received this new lease on life, so let’s not risk it, shall we? He resisted, but then often begrudgingly relented, understanding what it had been like for us to think him gone.

I awoke this morning in relief, a palpable sense of calm enveloping me. His death, this terrible loss and all the accompanying feelings, it had all been just a scare. A warning, a caution, but not real. I had just talked all night with my dad and he was very much alive, full of energy and wit and ideas as he had always been.

It was several minutes, as it often is after vivid dreams, before I reconciled this misperception with reality.

Oh. Oh no.

Oh no no no.

Dreams do two things, in my experience, alternating between them in random order. One of them is not, or not usually, to predict the future as I often feared and sometimes hoped in my youthful struggles with nightmares and particularly vivid night visions. No, they’re much simpler. They show us what we fear, mostly, so that we may prepare for and combat it. And once in a great while, they show us what we want, the accumulated hope and yearning of our heart accumulating into a great overnight runoff. It’s a pattern I recall from my 2010 loss, at least two marathon dreams filled with recanting and loving conversation were where my mind went soon after I’d realized this morning that, as they say, it was all a dream.

I am reminded, somehow, and not for the first time, of the denouement of The Time Traveler’s Wife (spoilers ahead), one of my favorite all-time books and a key part of my recommended reading on loss (alongside The Year of Magical Thinking, which is resonating absurdly hard right now). The final line, so simple and powerful, the product of the wife’s knowledge (or faith) that she is getting one more visit in her old age: “He is coming, and I am here.”

Life is not a novel, and daily life is less magical than we hope anyway. Or at least, the magic we get is harder to comprehend than time-travel, waving wands, or instant transport. In dreams, we get a glimpse of such a world. But in life, we must make magic and meaning from the more mundane. It’s there if you dig for it, but harder to see, and even harder to take solace from when times are tough. The temptation is strong to retreat from the conscious world. To borrow from Niffenegger again, “Sleep is my lover now, my forgetting, my opiate, my oblivion.”