"I remember throwing punches around and preaching from my chair"

 

Actually, it was Edmund who was doing the preaching. I only remember being really mad and wanting to punch him. Edmund, who recently died of a drug overdose, was my friend's cousin. We'd spent a few years together in the Remnant, the cult I was in back in the 80s. In my dream, we were having a heated discussion about the afterlife as we walked in a tidily manicured suburban park with a couple of other people.

I know it's not right to speak ill of the dead, but my friend's dead cousin was really pissing me off. Something about his cocksure conversational style--the way he would bluntly interrupt, never acknowledging any of my points--just irked me.

"No one can be sure of anything," I told him, repeating my mantra.

"Wrong!" Edmund shouted in my ear. He gave me the finger and laughed. "See? I knew I was gonna do that! Just because you don't know something doesn't mean others can't."

Manic and disruptive, he was like a guru on amphetamines, alternately poking me with insults and espousing wild conspiracy theories, making statements of fact as to the nature of reality and the purposeful meaninglessness of life. His belief system was incoherent, and his theories clashed with one another, but he didn't seem to care. I couldn't get one tent peg in the ground to tether his consciousness to the here and now. 

I just wanted to make him shut up, but I couldn't manage to get a word in. I felt the anger build to the point of boiling over. I think what I hated in him was what I hated in me: He was a narcissistic blowhard, a know-it-all know-nothing, a proudly pontificating mass of contradictions, consistent only in his inconsistency. 

I talked to one of the other people who was walking with us, and he had this advice as to how to handle the Edmund situation:

"You just gotta let him wind down," said Andy. "It's really all you can do. He's all amped up right now, and arguing with him will only make it worse. Just take a step back. He'll come around."

Andy was always level-headed. As a high school vice principal, Andy had seen more than his share of jacked up, out of control youth and dealt with their drug-induced mania on many occasions. He knew his stuff, so if this was his strategy, I guessed I was going to have to take his word for it.

"So I can't punch him?" I asked, still seething.

"Correct," Andy said succinctly, "you can't punch him." 

I don't remember any more of the dream, and soon I woke up with the song "Who Are You" playing in my head.