It's five years today that my dad passed away, and for the last couple of weeks he's been busy haunting my dreams.  I don't mind his making the odd appearance, but death is no excuse for bad manners, and he's been raising a ruckus whenever he manages to muscle his way into my otherwise placid dreams.  In fact, just before he showed up, I had taken up flying again, one of my most relaxing slumberland hobbies, and something I hadn't had time for all winter. 

In this age where even our real-life relationships are increasingly less tangible, and images and avatars stand in for friends, the dead live on like never before.  It's got me to thinking there may be something to this whole "ancestor worship" business, after all.  What can we do to keep them happy?  Should I have been thinking about my father more?  Should I be leaving fruit baskets at his "niche" in the chapel wall on bank holidays?  Will he then stop caterwauling every time I want to go out and fly around a bit — ALONE?

I guess I just miss my first dreams of my father after his death, which were quiet and dignified, if somber affairs.  But that didn't last long, in retrospect.  And that series of dreams was followed by a period of really vicious revisionist dreams.  I was back in my childhood, and every injury to my fledgling ego, real or imagined, was played out again.  Amplified several decibels, of course. 

People say what you dream has to do with what's going on in your waking life.  But everything's connected.  Isolated — horribly, radically isolated to the bitter end — but connected, like little boats, low in the water, stacked high with everything we own, tethered together by a very thin, tenuous little tug-line, all headed for the edge of a great roaring fall.   

Which is where flying comes in handy. 

It makes sense that ghosts would haunt you where they can get in: your dreams, that exotic preserve for all of life's curios, where hope and fear have a shape and form, and sinking and soaring are the same — you decide which way is up.  And I'm OK with my dreams being a safe harbor for a soul still searching for his place in mine, but please, two things: take off your shoes before you enter, and use your inside voice.