Last night I woke up in the middle of the night, having just had a dream about an old friend of mine.
Normally I don't write about dreams, or pay much attention to them, but in this case, after waking from the dream, I was struck about normal the dream was. There was very little of the surreal quality that normally occurs in a dream. Instead it felt much like a normal real-life conversation I would have had with my friend, if I were to see him today.
I last saw him seven years ago, and we had our last real conversation in 2012. We were once very close but we drifted away years ago. Over the years our conversations grew less intimate and more formal. Our interests diverged. Our estrangement as close friends, however, predates the political break I've had with many people I once held as friends.
He and I have great differences in the way we see the world, and in our political philosophies, but he has never been a great user of social media, except in the case of LinkedIn, where makes occasional posts that are related to his position with a large international organization that does work in the environmental field. He doesn't repost complaints from celebrities or harangue other people for their political heresies, like so many other people I once was friends with. As a result I'm fairly certain we could still have a cordial conversation, if we ever met again.
That's exactly what happened in the dream. It was a completely normal conversation, catching up with each other and our lives. There was no hidden rancor. I didn't feel like he was setting me up for a "gotcha" sting like so many of my leftist friends, who have come to think I must be stupid and easily led into their traps, because they believe all people who disagree with them are stupid in that way. So the dream felt quite refreshing.
In real life, my old friend is a busy man with many responsibilities in his organization. I've long since faded in his consciousness among the sea of people he knows. As part of his responsibilities, he has to talk to people all day long by phone, giving orders and relaying messages. The last time I talked to him, he bemoaned that his whole job consisted of the same phone conversations over and over.
As such, during the dream, as I talked to him, we were interrupted by somebody related to his work, an employee of his, and he had to turn and talk to that person. This too felt exactly as it would have taken place in real life.
The only surreal part of the dream occurred at this moment. While he talked to his subordinate, I turned and looked the other way and saw that I was inside his house. I saw his wife, at a distance, and she recognized me. She's a lovely person that I have known since shortly after they met, and I went to their wedding twenty years ago. She smiled and came over to greet me.
Thinking about her reminded me of a realization I had years ago, after I left New York and came back to Colorado. At the time I tried to make contact with my old circle of friends, many of whom were still close to each other, and got together for common activities. I was at a party, hosted by the friend I've mentioned and his wife, that included most of the old friends we knew. At the time they lived in Boulder. I hadn't seen many of those people in a while.
After the party I realized I had spent most of the time talking not to my old circle of friends, but to their spouses, both male and female, including my friend's wife who was in the dream. Talking to them felt normal, as if I could be myself and talk about anything that came up. They treated me as a normal human being, whereas the interactions with my old friends felt uncanny, as if they could only see me as the person I used to be years ago, even as they still got along with each other. I felt like a musician at a concert trying to perform his current work, whereas the people in the audience only wanted to hear the tired old hits from years ago, that had no traction in me anymore.
I had been away for years, of course, so in a way this was natural. Yet I had kept up with all of them, and had visited Colorado regularly, so it's not like there was a lack of continuity. I knew at the time that something else had happened, a deeper split among us, that had separated me permanently from my old friends. I knew it would never be the same with them, and since that time I have lost the expectation of intimacy of fellowship with them that I once had. Only in a few cases is the friendship still alive, in a way that is not simply a legacy of a friendship from years ago.
This fading away of the expectation of closeness with them made it easier when politics came between us as well. Around four years ago on Facebook it became apparent that many of the people I once knew had adopted the stance of intolerant leftism that sees everything as political, and sees everyone who disagrees with them as morally heinous. By then I had enough detachment from them that I could say goodbye to them in some way, that they didn't even know was a goodbye, and remove myself from their awareness, eventually deactivating my Facebook account. I had no desire for any kind of final statement to them. I could not bear to witness the kind of ugliness that had overtaken them, in their enlisting in what I saw as an army of contracted hatred. I preferred to remember them the way I once knew them.
A couple days ago, right after I wrote the last blog piece about Portland, I had felt an almost tectonic shift of awareness in myself. I realized that although part of me still longed to see many of my old friends, I had no desire to talk to them. I might want to see them and wave to them from afar, with a friendly smile that would be sincere. I would even be willing to listen to them, if they had something they needed to say to me, but I had nothing to say to them, so long as they were in the grips of the kind of madness they had fallen into. I am so disappointed in so many of them this way.
I know in a few cases that there are old friends who do not at all want to see me, nor to listen to me, but would be fine giving me an earful of what they think about me. It's their right to think of me as they wish. At the present time, I would simply look at them and turn away.
This awareness of personal boundaries is one that I had never quite experienced in my life. I had always granted others this kind of boundary---of not wanting to talk to me, for various reasons---but I had never truly granted it to myself. Afterward I realized this, I meditated on this awareness. It gave me great peace, one that preserves the sincere charity I still hold for them, as brothers and sisters in this world, yet with a newfound nuance of reserve and detachment, one which does not feel injurious, and which is not meant as injurious to them
I felt I had finally let them go at last. Then last night the dream came to me, and I woke up, and stayed awake so that the dream became part of my conscious recollections. I went outside onto porch and said prayers to God with my friends in mind.
Some of these friendships are gone forever, and I will never these people again, because in so many cases seeing them depended on my initiating contact, which I no longer intend to do. But in some cases, through happenstance or through their own initiation, I might see them, and we will talk again, in some way cordial or friendly. Whether that happens is not up to me, and that is the part I am at peace with.
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