For forty years, Imaginary Keith slept like the proverbial baby. Not the fussy, wake up every two hours and feed me kind, but the other kind. The imaginary kind. It’s only in the last two years that sleep has decided that its had quite enough of my friend’s good company. The two still visit, but it is sporadic and forced. The conversation of their old friendship now seems lost forever.
But that’s good news for me, perched in my usual spot down by the foot of the bed, near the corner where I have a good angle on all the twisting and turning that’s going on. Two years of restless sleep for Imaginary Keith has become a real goldmine for me. The motherlode of dreams. Each morning my pockets bulge with therapy-sized nuggets.
“If there was a market for dreams, you’d make me a rich boy,” I whispered into Imaginary Keith’s ear last night, following a particularly action-packed, 1930’s looking version of Law & Order, only without the loud DAAA-DAAAAAA music between each scene. It was all Imaginary Keith could do to stay out of the way, as bullets flew from all sides as some sort of high-stakes turf war raged between a brickmason’s union and a pizzeria owner. And if that wasn’t action enough, there were meat locker coolers to be searched (rumors of dead bodies) and a meeting with a mysterious woman, hidden behind a dark pair of sunglasses, sitting behind the wheel of a gigantic 4x4 parked on the third level of a downtown parking garage. The meeting goes poorly, and Imaginary Keith is pushed over the edge of the garage by the monster truck’s equally monsterous front bumper. As he falls, he hears someone yell out that yes, the mysterious 4x4 woman is the same woman sought after by both the owner of the pizzeria and the brickmasons.
The dream went on and on, but there’s no reason I have to.
Around 5:00 am, just before waking up (again), the eyelids really get hopping. Enough of the physical action, this time it is all mental. Imaginary Keith, feeling under the pillows in the bed, begins to discover files and folders filled with family history that he knew nothing about. Not ancient history either, but stuff going on in the present, right under his nose. Good stuff. The files are filled with pictures and references to kids in the family that he never even knew existed. The only real surprise, he thinks, is just how many files there are. How many secrets can one family have?
This last dream of the night is not that far from the truth, except that the family secrets aren’t kept conveniently hidden in files under the bed pillows. Only three years ago, Imaginary Keith discovers that he is half-brother to some little renegade running around the streets of Costa Rica. And rumors, yet uncomfirmed, are that there is also a little half-sister, running around those same streets. This doesn’t bother my friend too much, although he sometimes fears they will show up when he is an old, feeble man, push their way into his home, and call him gringo.