I wrote this about fifteen years ago.
2011 (tidied up by 2026):
I just had the greatest dream of my life.
I was doing a two-man stand-up show with my son, Owen (who, annoyingly, had a better beard than me) and I was in my early fifties.
The show began with me talking about my life from this point; right now: a series of failed relationships that fuelled my alcoholism far more than my creativity.
Then I met a red-headed nerd girl named Ally (or Alicia, dreams are unreliable narrators) and we started a relationship completely free of baggage. No surrogate paternity. No paranoia. No jealousy. None of the fun stuff.
She’d invite her friends over to our apartment to play Dungeons & Dragons while I sat on the couch looking like “some random bogan.” I never joined in. They didn’t take to me at all. Fantasy-culture people often seem oddly dismissive of me.
One friend in particular absolutely despised me. His name was Alan, and he had convinced himself that Ally would eventually “come to her senses” and end up with him. He was what Patton Oswalt once described as “b-word fat.” The best way I can describe him is that he looked like he’d once been a scrawny eight-foot-tall man who had somehow melted down into a five-foot-five frame, both in height and width.
We argued constantly because he made two things painfully obvious: a). he hated me; and b). he believed Ally was ultimately his.
I kept telling him that if you truly loved someone, you respected whatever choice they made, even if that choice wasn’t you. That probably stems from my complete hatred of people trying to reshape others into something more convenient for themselves.
Anyway, Ally and I moved in together, and everything was fine for a while.
Then I went overseas for work. I’d apparently written some wildly successful show about a school principal and his three daughters who all lived at the school. Yeah, I know. Dream television. Somehow it made me rich enough to walk away from it with summit-meeting money.
When I got home, Ally tearfully confessed that she’d had a one-night stand with Alan.
Rather than explode, I told her I was going away for a few days so we could both clear our heads and decide what we actually wanted. Real-life experience has taught me exactly what not to do when a relationship starts collapsing.
When I returned, the apartment was destroyed and her friends were treating the place like a communal cum-rag.
I walked calmly into the kitchen and told her I thought the relationship had run its course, and that we should probably move on with our lives.
At some point during all this, Alan had started trying to become me.
Beanie pulled down to the eyebrows. Flash-sheet tattoos. Band shirts from groups you’ve probably never heard of, but which he insisted would “change your life.” The only thing that really bothered me was the tribal tattoo on his forearm, because I remember staring at it thinking: there is absolutely no fucking way this white-on-white-on-vanilla motherfucker belongs to whatever tribe that’s meant to represent.
He looked like someone cosplaying me at Comic Con after designing the costume in the parking lot five minutes beforehand.
So we broke up, and I started drinking again. Heavily.
To the point where actual real-life people began appearing in my dream specifically to stop me from dying of dream alcohol poisoning.
Eventually, hazy details, because dream, I cleaned myself up.
Then fourteen years passed.
Not in a montage way, either. I was aware of the passage of time. Fourteen entire years happened inside my dream.
Suddenly we were back on stage. Older me sat down, the spotlight shifted, and Owen began telling the audience how we met.
Apparently I was hanging around a video store in my hometown (yes, video stores still existed fourteen years into the future) when he recognised me as “that film guy.” Normally I hate talking to strangers, but his taste in movies interested me enough that I invited him to hang out while I was in town.
Which means that, technically, my subconscious wrote a scenario where I unknowingly tried to pick up my own imaginary son.
That evening, though, I got a phone call.
The woman on the other end sounded completely frazzled, and at first I was mostly annoyed because she was struggling to get to the point. Then I realised it was Ally, and that she was desperately telling me to stay away from her son, Owen.
At that point I became the frazzled one, rapidly assembling an apology out of panic, old newspapers, glue sticks, and sawdust. The only thing I knew for certain was that I needed to apologise for “talking to your son.”
Because I had absolutely no idea he was mine.
I had no idea that fourteen years earlier, during my drunken spiral, Ally had come by to collect the last of her belongings and that, somehow, I’d managed to make her fall in love with me one final time.
I don’t know what I said to her that night. If I did, I’d probably spend the rest of my real life trying to recreate it.
So yes: I dream-conceived a dream-child with my dream-ex-girlfriend who dream-cheated on me.
The strange thing was that, even though the version of me inside the story didn’t know Owen was my son yet, the version of me sitting on stage already did.
And despite his mother’s warnings, Owen kept hanging out with me.
He told me stories about his life, but what I gradually pieced together was this:
Alan and Ally eventually ended up together. Alan celebrated like he’d conquered something. Then he became abusive and useless while Ally carried the weight of everything.
The more Owen talked, the more I noticed little mannerisms we shared. Small things. The way he spoke. The way he reacted to jokes. My imagination started running wild.
Eventually I told him that I knew his mother, that we’d lived together years ago.
And that’s where the dream ended. Or the writing stopped. And that's where I come back in.
2026:
I wrote this about fifteen years ago, after a breakup. If I'm honest, I can't even tell you if this really happened.
I remember being twenty-three and thinking that relationship was everything. I wasn’t doing well at the time and was making some genuinely poor choices, so my self-esteem and sense of worth had quietly become dependent on another person. That’s what a shithead does to survive.
What I feel and what I want known is that I wish this person nothing but pure wellbeing and a long, fruitful life; entirely away from me (meant as kindly as possible).
Funnily enough, there are two “Alicias” in my life: I once had a brief ... dalliance (?) with someone by that name (it was rightfully brief, I was awful at the time), and I’ve also been with an “A”-named redhead since 2013.
Dreams are one of the best gifts we have because, for a few hours, we can be anyone all at once. I’ve lived hundreds of lives in dreams. I’ve died dozens of times. I’ve been the victim in absurd horror plots. Just last night I was being chased through a town by aggressively conservative locals and had to escape by climbing through a horizontal bus. Dreams feel limitless in a way waking life rarely does.
Are they guiding us toward some kind of destiny? Or are our paths as humans quietly shaped by the strong emotional reactions we have to imagined things? Our brains cleaning themselves overnight.
And...
Maybe that’s why dreams linger. They rarely end where a story should end. They stop at the exact moment you become emotionally invested in continuing them yourself.
You wake up grieving people who never existed, mourning choices you never made, and carrying memories from lives your brain assembled while you were out to the world that really matters.
But sometimes dreams do something kinder than escapism. Sometimes they quietly reveal the person you were, the person you’re afraid of becoming, and the person you still hope exists somewhere ahead of you.
Even if he has a better beard.
