You may not think dreams mean much. But I cannot help but be entranced, fascinated by them.

For instance:

Andy reported a dream where Mark was sitting in his living room, on the couch – it felt very real. Andy had a list of questions he wanted to ask Mark – he’d tried before, in a dream, but either didn’t ask or didn’t have a chance or woke up. So when he saw Mark on the couch, he said, “Do you mind if I ask you some questions?” and Mark was like, “sure.”

Andy said he asked him several things, but the only one he could remember, when he awoke, was this:

“Did it hurt when you got hit by the car?” To which Mark responded: “Not as much as you’d think.”

(that gives us all some sense of relief, actually)

Later, in the same dream, Mark – slightly irritated that Andy was distracted with something else – commented that it took a lot of energy to be there, to be present.

Whoa.

And then one day recently, I dreamed about Mark, Sarah dreamed about Mark (and Sarah, like her dad, rarely remembers her dreams) and Kathy R. dreamed about Mark.

In Sarah’s, she saw Mark out walking around (i.e., he wasn’t dead). When she confronted him, she discovered he’d been hiding away all this time, playing video games. To her frustration, he was completely nonchalant about the impact he’d had on US (thinking he was dead, when he was NOT), conveying “hey, no big deal!” She said it actually amused her on a lot of levels; I said it was a perfect representation of their relationship.

In Kathy’s, Mark was in an HGTV-style renovation show, where he was the acting electrical engineer, and he was having a great time – hamming it up, playing to the audience. She woke up smiling.

In mine, Steve and I got a phone call that Mark was in the hospital with pneumonia. I went to the hospital searching for him; after several wrong turns, I found him in a long ward full of beds. My mom had spread out a picnic lunch on the bedspread (so true to life); my dad and some man I didn’t recognize (later I determined it may have been HIS dad, who I never met; he died when my dad was 22) were sitting in two chairs at the end of the bed. And there stood Mark, next to the bed, looking a little sheepish. He’s often smaller, younger in my dreams. And I grabbed him and hugged him hard, again feeling his physical self in my arms, and I was so, so happy he was alive.

“How did you get pneumonia?” I asked.

“Noodling” he replied. (Apparently, not every part of every dream is profound)

And I woke up.