Recurring Dream: Canto El Primero

Location: beneath the old water tower at the Nickelodeon “old-west town”
City: Colton, CA
Participants: my brother and me

I am eleven years old, hiding behind the posts that hold up the water tower in this fake western town built around the old pizza joint that went under the name of Nickelodeon, and though I only started going when I was fourteen, in the dream I am eleven, and my brother is twelve, and he is the cowboy chasing me, the Indian who’s invaded his town, playing with me in such a typical way that was so atypical of our childhood together. This goes on for a while, and while we’re playing I notice we’re getting older—slowly, perhaps, for the dream, but considerably fast as we reach our teens and beyond as we continue playing.

There is no one else in town. The place was boarded up long before the dreams started and in my dream it was already locked behind the temporary fencing one rents to surround construction zones. But people have forgotten about this construction zone and it is, for once, exactly what it always purported to be: an abandoned, or at least declining western town. The pizza was never very good.

But the pizza’s not why we’re here. We are playing. Cowboys and Indians. Oddly enough, neither of us has a gun. We stay a while under the tower and then we start straying, just a little farther every time around the base—and that’s when we hear it. At first, it is a faint and distant sound, like a quick buzz going by our heads, followed by a hard slap onto the dusty ground a little farther down. I identify it first. I don’t know how old I am now, but I am considerably older than the eleven I was when this got started.

I tell my brother to run, that there’s someone shooting at us with a silencer. I have no idea why. It sounds almost ridiculous telling the story now, but someone’s playing target practice with us and we have to run. We begin to run away from the water tower, towards the arcade right next to the pizza place, but we don’t make it.

I don't know what happened to my brother, but as I’m running, I feel the aging process accelerating, though I don’t really notice it then; I remember it later. Suddenly, as I run away, I feel a sharp slap on the back of my head, and the warm sensation of blood running down my back. The force knocks me forward and I fall and bounce and fall again. My body now lies sideways, my face looking back towards the tower, and as I see the dust gently settle back down to the ground, I think “I am too young to die; I am only thirty-five.”

And as the dust settles, I die.

This is the only dream in which I have ever died. I had it semi-regularly, every few months, for years (about five in total) prior to my thirty-fifth birthday. On my birthday, I went alone at dusk, and then again with my best friend around eleven at night, to walk the lot. The buildings had been demolished; there was no sign of anything I remembered, except a couple of partial concrete slabs on which the building perhaps rested once. But I walked around; and I called out in my head for whatever it was that had summoned me there.

But nothing came.

Other than my best friend, I was alone with the moon and the stars and the wind. Not even a black cat crossed my path. The spell, now broken, I never had the dream again.

Three months after my birthday, my brother, only thirty-six at the time, died of a heart attack while playing basketball with the kids in the neighborhood. He was dead before he reached the hospital. When I reached the hospital, I had them call the local Catholic Church to ask that they send a priest to pray with us over his body. The priest sent word along these lines: “What’s the point? He’s dead already, and we only perform the last rites on the dying.”

He never came.

What does it all mean?