# 9 Dream

"Woke Up, Jumped Out Of Bed, Dragged A Comb Across My Head." The dream was So real! I'm in New York City, and I stumble upon, all these years later, my old friend, Mark Vos. Driving out from the Des Moines airport on a Saturday morning earlier in the summer, on my way back from a red-eye flight from Las Vegas, I had caught him on the air on "The River". But this dream puts me in Manhattan, bite the big apple. Mark is "on the air" at a little radio station, and it's great for me to be back in a radio studio. I miss it. Once a disc jockey, always a disc jockey! There's a guest in the studio. Seems like a nice guy. He's here to talk about his new record. Suddenly I'm in the show, and Mark & I are both talking to this rock musician. Vos, as usual, is asking the deep, meaningful questions. The rock star is fielding interesting inquisitive questions with ease. I suddenly realize that the dude we are talking to is Paul McCartney! In the dream, time has gotten between the Beatles and their fans. Paul has faded into the woodwork, and is no longer physically recognizable by the public. He's incognito, like Howard Hughes, Steve Miller, or Joe Walsh. Only his hardcore fans even know what Paul looks like now, and that's good, because he can move about without any trouble. In this dream, Paul McCartney is able to relate to people no longer through his fame, but now only through the energy of his spirit, which is strong and meaningful. It's the love that the Beatles left in their wake that now remains, burning through for generations; the message, the energy, and the love. There I am, starstruck, relishing this opportunity, my one moment to have a meaningful conversation with McCartney. Then this old dude with a hat breezes in, sits down to talk to Paul, and interrupts the interview. He's real nice about it, cordial, shakes our hands. He interrupts because he's got some business he clearly wants to discuss with McCartney. For a minute, I thought it was an aging Garrison Keillor. But no, I realize, it's a 60 year-old John Lennon. Suddenly, we're not in Manhattan anymore. We're on another plane somewhere, in a flowing continuum. "Suddenly I woke, and I went into a dream." So I'm in the middle of this conversation with Paul McCartney, and Lennon interrupts. I want to make sure that I include Mark Vos into this rare opportunity, since Mark's knowledge of the Beatles is TEN times deeper than mine! Mark Vos, after all, is the one who put together the John Lennon retrospective, which was played on our rock station the day of John Lennon's memorial, back in December, 1980. I was simply the one who happened to be on the air when Lennon was killed. So, I totally wanted to include Vossy in this experience, since he was sitting across the room anyway, in this little radio studio in my dream. So I turn and introduce John to Mark, and John says, "Oh yeah, Mark's a good friend of mine!" The two of them banter about their mutual interests, and John invites Mark to bring his family over for dinner. I then discover that they actually are friends, live close to each other, and run in the same circles. Now I'm somewhere in a very hip, urban retirement community, somewhere between Central Park West and Heaven. The dream accelerates. I manage to give my E-mail address to Paul McCartney, in the hopes that he might have found me enchanting enough to strike up a conversation. Then, the Beatles gotta leave. So we're out on the street, and John and Paul jump into a London taxi, and they pull away. And now Mark Vos is gone, too. He's off to his life. And I'm left there. And then in the dream, Mark's son appears. And he leads me to Mark's home nearby. This son is a teenager, and he's just witnessed this entire encounter, and my kids were there, too. And the kids got it, they instantly understood John and Paul, and the positive energy that came from them. And from just being present in the room, they totally got it. The energy flow was universal, and non-generational. So Mark's teenage son leads me in the dream, to the inner circle of Mark's family. And the Beatles are there, all four of them. Then it all comes clear, the family bonds, the passing through generations, the quiet enjoyment of free life, the power of the peace sign, and the bonds of friendship. The sudden awareness awakens me, with a flow of emotion, and the words pour out on the page, for an hour now.

"And in the end, the love you take, is equal to the love you make."