I’ve met people who remember their dreams, but I’m not one of them. I wake up early and think, “Wow, that was a wild dream,” but ten minutes later, I forget what the dream was about.

But last night was different. I dreamt that my father was being carted away on a stretcher to a Ralph’s grocery store. The medics were zombies. A zombie surgeon waited inside to perform open heart surgery. My father was unconscious with his shirt open, with those suction cups attached to his chest with the EKG monitor by his side.

I begged the medics not to take him in there, but zombies wouldn’t listen.

I’ll never know what happened to my father once he was inside the Ralph’s. Sometimes dreams have sequels. Maybe I’ll go to bed tonight and have the same dream. Only this time, it’ll continue where the first dream left off.

I don’t believe I have control over my dreams. I seem to be passive in them. Some people practice lucid dreaming. There are certain rituals before bedtime to activate lucidity. One of them is to keep a dream journal. That’s all fine and dandy if one can remember what the hell they’d dreamt about. I cannot. I’m better off not dreaming at all, which is fine by me. Far too many times have I awakened from a bad dream and thought, “Holy hell, that felt real.” I can’t afford bad dreams. Life is a bad dream already. Who needs a double dose?

The only difference is life isn’t bizarre enough to where surrealism plays a factor. Except Trump was president. That was surreal in its own fashion.

A friend of mine said he once had a dream where his keys were made out of salami.

Some people claim to be dream interpreters. My old psychiatrist said he could analyze them, any of them. I dreamt that I threw up in a car in front of an Auto Zone. I was in the passenger seat, and a jerk whom I used to work with was manning the steering wheel drunk.

My psychiatrist asked me what the color of the vomit was to make sense out of the dream.

I made up the color because I didn’t remember. ”It was yellow,” I said.

”It means you fear you’ll lose control.”

I thought I could’ve figured that out on my own. But I said, “Wonderful insight, doctor.”

Anyway, my dreams have never enhanced my life. They’re just disturbances in my sleep. I wouldn’t mind if I never dreamt again.