Something very strange happened last night.
At my advanced age, I don’t often have vivid, complex dreams anymore.
I used to have quite a few, some pleasant and some that would qualify as nightmares. For about 15 years starting in my late teens, I had dreams in which I was being chased and before being caught, I would fly away.
Without an airplane, hang glider or even a kite.
A therapist told me my dream had me looking for magical solutions to my problems.
In my thirties, I had a different sort of recurring dream. I would be driving along on a highway and one of two things would happen. In some dreams, the highway would end at the end of a cliff with a drop of thousands of feet ahead. In others, I would be driving along and all of a sudden, the road ahead turned vertical at an impossible angle.
It didn’t take a doctor to tell me I was seeing problems with no solutions.
I stopped having those dreams in the mid ’90s, soon after I married for the second time. My wife Nicole is an amazing woman, and in six weeks we will celebrate our 30th wedding anniversary. At any rate, I had a dream where I needed for some unknown reason to get to the top of a small Colorado mountain with a road going up at a nearly vertical angle. I remember thinking I could never do that, and Nicole said she would do it for me.
She did it successfully. I think it might have been the best dream I ever had in my life.
Not only did she complete the task successfully, when she returned we took the equivalent on a gondola right up a stream with candles lighting both sides. I never had the impossible driving dream again.
As I said earlier, I don’t really have all that many vivid dreams anymore.
But last night I dreamed about Charlottesville.
Charlottesville, Virginia — specifically, the University of Virginia — was where my life went off track at age 17. It was the first of three times I flunked out of school before age 22, and I never completely got over it. I went back for a summer session in 1973 and got OK grades, but not good enough to go back in the fall.
The only times I made it back were in 1976 and 1980 to see my sister Hilary play Juliet in her first year at to play Helen Kelley in summer theatre. And as a sportswriter covering Ralph Sampson’s final home basektball game in 1983.
But I dream about being back in school there and the dreams never have happy endings. They always ended with me being at the end of a semester and being far behind and unable to catch up.
I did get something good out of my time there, though. My novel “A Whiter Shade of Pale” — the best thing I wrote in my life — was about a year at Virginia. A year I wish I had had.
Last night I had a different Charlottesville dream, a strange one in that I wasn’t young and I wasn’t in school. I found myself in a massive shopping mall that never existed there, having trouble finding my way out. Lots of details, seemingly longer than most dreams and extremely vivid.
Very strange.
And if I’m lucky, my last Charlottesville dream.
They hurt too much.