I was in Kona.
The sun peered at Hawaii, turning the Pacific into a sheet of hammered gold. Somewhere behind me, palm trees whispered in the morning breeze. Somewhere in front of me, several extraordinarily beautiful women were danced.
I had no idea why. This is one of the advantages of dreams. Nobody asks for motivation.
One of the women stopped dancing and glided toward me.
She was beautiful in the effortless way women are beautiful in dreams, where nobody has pores, bad knees, mortgages, or opinions about cholesterol.
She sat beside me.
Then she moved closer.
Much closer.
She put her head against my shoulder.
I remember thinking that life, after several decades of questionable management, had finally begun to work out.
“Good morning.”
I ignored it.
The woman moved even closer.
“Good morning.”
I opened my eyes.
Hawaii disappeared.
So did the Pacific Ocean.
So did the dancing women.
Standing beside my bed was Daniel.
Daniel was six.
He was a sweet little boy who lived in a world that did not always operate according to the same rules as mine. He was on the autism spectrum and had special needs. He understood a great deal, but getting his thoughts into words could be difficult. His sentences often arrived in pieces.
“Morning,” he said.
I looked hopefully toward the other side of the bed, in case one of the Hawaiian women had survived the transition.
No such luck.
“Well,” I said. “Good morning to you.”
Daniel smiled.
“How are you doing?”
“Good.”
There was a pause.
Daniel was still standing there.
Experience had taught me that when Daniel said he was good but continued standing beside my bed, I was about to become involved in something. “Something wrong?”
He looked at the floor.
“Little problem.”
“How little?”
He thought about it.
“Big little.”
That didn’t sound promising.
“What happened?”
“I pooped.”
This was not the direction the morning had been heading in Kona. “All right,” I said.
“Got some.”
“Got some … where?” I asked.
“On things.”
“What things?”
“Wall.”
I closed my eyes. For one glorious second, Hawaii returned. Then I opened them. “The wall?” I asked.
He nodded.
“Little bit.”
“Only the wall?”
Daniel looked away. “Other things,” he said.
“What other things?”
He thought about this for quite a while. “Come see.”
This is almost never a sentence that improves a morning.
I got out of bed.
Daniel led me down the hallway and into his room.
I stopped at the doorway.
There are moments in life when the human brain refuses to immediately process the information being supplied by the eyes. This was one of them. “Daniel,” I said.
“Yeah?”
“What happened?”
He pointed at the wall. “Picture.”
“That’s a picture?”
He nodded.
“I make it.”
“I can see that.”
“Was making.”
“Making what?” I asked.
“Horse.”
I stared at the wall. Now that he mentioned it, there was something vaguely representational about the catastrophe.
“That’s a horse?” I asked.
“Horses.”
I looked again.It could have been horses. It could also have been Saskatchewan. “Why did you make a horse on the wall?”
Daniel frowned. The question apparently contained several questions, and he was sorting them out.
“Needed brown.”
“Brown?”
“For horses.”
“You needed something brown for the horses.”
He nodded vigorously.
“No brown paper.”
I began to understand.
I wished I didn’t. “So you made some brown?”
“Yeah.”
“With poop?”
He looked at the wall.
“Yeah.”
There was another long pause.
Then he wrinkled his nose. “Bad smell.”
“Yes.”
“Really bad.”
“Yes.”
“Horses smells,” he said.
“The horses definitely smell.”
He looked at me. “Sorry.”
That changed everything.
He wasn’t laughing.
He wasn’t trying to be naughty.
He had wanted to make a horse or two. A horse needed to be brown. There was no brown paper. He had found something brown.
The logic was impeccable.
The medium needed work.
“It’s okay,” I said. “We’ll clean it up.”
“I clean.”
“You tried to clean it?”
He nodded.
“With what?”
He pointed.
That explained the towel. And possibly the lamp.
“All right,” I said. “Let’s do it together.”
We went to work.
For a while neither of us said anything.
Then Daniel looked at me. “You sleeping?” he asked.
“I was.”
“Dream?”
“Yes.”
“What dream?”
“I was in Hawaii.”
He stopped wiping.
“Hawaii?”
“Yes.”
“I there?”
“No.”
He stared at me. “Why?”
I stopped scrubbing the wall.
It was an excellent question. “I don’t know.”
He considered that. “I go next time.”
“You want to be in my dream next time?”
“Yeah.”
“All right.”
“Hawaii got horses?”
“I’m pretty sure Hawaii has horses.”
He smiled.
“Brown ones?”
“Almost certainly.”
He looked back at what remained of his masterpiece.
“I make horse Hawaii.”
I pointed the sponge at him. “With a pencil,” I said.
He thought about that.
Then he laughed. “Pencil.”
“Definitely pencil.”
And somewhere, several thousand miles away, the sun was still rising over Kona.
My beautiful women were probably wondering where I had gone.
But standing there in my pajamas, cleaning an extremely unfortunate horse off a bedroom wall with Daniel beside me, I had the peculiar thought that perhaps I hadn’t been awakened from the good part of my life.
Perhaps I had been awakened into it.
