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When I was a child, I had horrible nightmares. Some only once, but others were recurring. I remember a couple, specifically, but the most memorable was a dream I had often. In this dream, I woke to find that the Russians were invading our neighborhood. No one was home at my house, and I could see the tanks and lines of soldiers moving from home to home, checking for occupants. I don’t know where my parents or sisters were, but I knew I had to get out of that house. Luckily, I had a system of tunnels dug between my house and the house next door, starting in the linen cote at the end of my hallway, and leading to the coat closet of my neighbor, Mrs. Brachsma.
The problem with this plan was, of course, that Mrs. Brachsma had a dog. Not just any dog, either. Mrs. Brachsma had a large, overly aggressive pit-bull named Trigger. Trigger was the source of many additional nightmares for me as a child. He had an angry, gruffly voice like Curly from City Slickers. When he spoke, and he spoke to me often, I felt the overwhelming need to clear my own throat, like when someone else is talking with a clogged throat and you look around and see everyone whose listening clearing their own passageways, hoping that the speaker will see this mass throat clearing going on around them and clear his or her own throat. Anyway, Trigger spoke in this type of voice and reminded me of his dominance over me.
In this nightmare, as I would arrive into Mrs. Brachsma’s coat closet in her foyer, Russians getting ever so much closer to our house, Trigger would always sense my presence and come to greet me. “Hello boy,” he would say, “don’t you realize what time it is?” “Trigger!” I did my best to whisper, hoping not to alert the troops. “Go home.” It was usually at this point that I realized that I was now standing back in my own hall closet and Trigger was also in my house—so were the Russians.
This is where I woke up.
Most nights, when nightmares happened, I would simply roll over, bury my head in my pillow and force myself back to sleep. But not on the Russian Trigger nights. Something about this dream was so real to me—so vivid and alarming and scary and awakening—that I never could go back to sleep. On these nights I would head down that same hallway, pas the linen closet door and into my parents’ bed. Most nights I would sleep between my mom and the edge of the bed, so as not to disturb them. When I was really scared, however, I slid ever so delicately between them, shimmying under the coarse Aztec-inspired blanket and wedging myself into this cocoon of warm security.
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In the few moments between my arrival and my collapse back into sleep, I got the chance to study my father. My father is a contractor, and he usually left before I got up in the morning, and came home late. He worked every day, including Sunday, to keep us in a house we couldn’t afford, in a neighborhood where we could go to the best schools and be safe. He worked hard. He slept hard too.
I watched him sleep. I watched his massive lungs fill and empty like giant waves in the Hawaiian shore. Inhale – the cool air chases away doubt and fear and worry and sorrow. Exhale – the hot air leaves, taking with it pain and shame and unhappiness. His eyes fluttered in dream and his fists clenched and released, only to clench and release again.
It was his breath I remember the best. I remember his breath other times, like on Sunday mornings when I would sit on his lap and he would tie my tie. He would put his head on my left shoulder and look down over me as he looped and went around, then through and around and then loop back and then through – completing a perfect double Windsor every time – like a ballerina on stage. I remember his breath, warm and rhythmic, coarse and hard against my ear. But at night, as I lay in their bed, there was no coarseness, no edge. Only full, wavelike breaths. In and out in again and back out.
It was warm and sour. A mixture of peppermint toothpaste and sweet tea. Rolaids and fruit-flavored Tums – both likely consumed within the last hour. His breath was both pointed and diffused as if he were pushing a sailboat along the creek while simultaneously trying to fog the mirror in the bathroom. The warmth covered my whole being, scared away the demons that kept me awake. The sweet rhythm, melodic and true, lulled me to sleep. Time went on, and eventually, I stopped having this nightmare – and I forgot the breath.
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My daughter never had nightmares—at least not that I can remember. If she did, she crept ever so delicately into the room and slid under the covers by her mother, careful not to wake me.
My son though, he is a dreamer. When I say dreamer, what I mean is, well, he gets a lot of his traits from daddy. My wife noticed this early on and promptly trained him to wake only Daddy when he had a bad dream. I spent countless nights, lying in bed listening to the monitor, waiting for that moment, that gentle moan or sniffle. I waited for that quick breath, the one that comes straight from the lungs out the nose, alerting me that there was a scenario unfolding behind those giant, innocent, fluttering eyes. I spent many nights falling asleep in his tiny bed, only to be woken up hours later by my wife, then trying to ever so carefully get out of his bed and carry my cranky, aching body back to my own bed. Only to wake up an hour later to a tiny face, standing over me – alert and wide-eyed. “I had a bad dream.” I carried him back to bed, and usually by the time we got to his room he was sound asleep, his face pressed against mine, comfortable in Daddy’s arms.
Some nights, though, he didn’t stand above me. He, too, had a recurring dream. His dream involved a lake by our house (he couldn’t swim at the time), and an alligator – and, on the worst nights, a terrible shark that lived in that lake. I tried to explain that sharks couldn’t live in a freshwater lake, but dreams are a son of a bitch. On those nights, the alligator/lake/shark nights, he would end up next to me. He would crawl into the bed, cover himself and face away from me, taking great care to place the bottom of both of his feet on my shins.
If nothing else, he is a creature of habit, and only rarely did he ever sleep facing me. It was those nights, those rare nights when he slept on my pillow, nose to nose with me, that I felt it. It was the breath. My son has the same breath as my father. His tiny lungs filled with air, like a balloon being filled by that lady at Publix, the one who wears too much makeup to cover the pain in her eyes. She stands in that tiny kiosk surrounded by cut flowers and birthday balloons, constantly reminded of a life that has passed her by. His lungs empty, like a set of bellows, trying to stoke a fire somewhere. His tiny Kundalini practice of breathing in and breathing out soothes me. His breath, like my father’s, carries a sticky sour taste. A smell of Buzz Lightyear toothpaste and mint waxed floss, chased with a slice of my wife’s red delicious apple that he snuck when she wasn’t looking. His breath is warm and innocent, soft and forgiving, humble and hopeful. I breathe in his breath. I had long forgotten hopeful, and soft and innocent. I had forgotten how to fill my lungs with hope and exhale out my doubts and fears.
My father taught me to breathe and I forgot. Now, as I lay here, my son teaches me again. Breathing in, I am joyful. Breathing out, I am safe. Breathing in, I am protected. Breathing out, I will protect you.
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Photo credit: Getty Images