I saw my old friend Jonah the other day, it must have been twelve years since I’d so much as heard rumor of his whereabouts. We’d been incredibly close once, but simply drifted apart for reasons that I can’t properly remember now, which is strange, because other scenes are playing out with perfect accuracy.

“So I had this dream last night. I can only remember bits and pieces of it, but it won’t stop haunting me.” Jonah said and took sip of coffee from the chipped mug I’d handed him when he rapped lightly on my apartment door that morning. His eyes seemed to lose focus; as if there had been some odd scene behind my head that only he could see. I’d known him for three years at this point, but it was a recent event that we’d begun the process of becoming friends outside the circle of acquaintances that had initially introduced us. It had been an odd process; on my end the warmth and respect of friendship had progressed at a nearly equal rate with the growing sense of unease about where he was heading. The truth was that even then, I saw Jonah as a man bound for some unknown disaster, and the sensation only increased my desire to – I hate say it like this, but it was true – take care of him.

“What do you remember of it?” I asked; shattering his reverie and bringing his eyes back into focus. Those eyes settled on me and a smile stretched across his unshaven face.

“Fuck man, that’s hard to explain. The one thing I can say for certain is that it is possible to have deja-vu in a dream. It was one of those epics that stretched across a couple of separate chapters, you know, you’re hitting the snooze-bar and you keep picking up the thread of the story, only the setting has been skewed, and a couple of the characters replaced like a sitcom that keeps shedding actors.”

I laughed at that one, and after a moment he did too. Jonah always had a gift for the apt phrase, a way of playfully tearing apart the language to make it his own, that particular analogy was pretty bad, but that was another nice thing; he’d dropped these insane and yet somehow appropriate lines so often that it had become almost a habit to laugh, and he’d laugh with you, no matter how terrible the joke, no matter how serious the subject matter. With Jonah, every subject was both so earnestly serious that you felt if you ever managed to get to the bottom of what was engaging his mind at that moment; some great truth would be revealed and the world would be a better place while simultaneously understanding that it was absurd regardless, or perhaps that was what made it so absurd. The micro and the macro had joined hands with the sacred and profane; you could weep tears of bitter joy while you clutched your stomach in the throes of hysterical laughter.

I had always wondered how he could be so shy in so many social settings, despite having heard him explain that he was only shy around people who he wanted to get to know; those random strangers that his uncommon mind had dismissed were open targets for all manner of lunacy, as were his friends, it was only those folks who’d catch his interest that could occasionally leave him tongue-tied and acting awkwardly. When he confessed that, I remembered all the nervous tics he’d displayed during our first few conversations and took it as a compliment; it had helped to cement our friendship.

“Nothing like a dream mini-series.” I said when the laughter died.

“I’m glad you understand, I always wonder if I’m just crazy when I experience these kinds of things.”

“Well you are crazy.”

He paused. “An excellent point, but then, by your own admission to understanding those bits and pieces of the things I say, so are you. And- in that case- all we need to do is find a few others and we’ll negate the lunacy entirely. How many people did Arlo Guthrie say you needed before you had a movement?”

“I never claimed sanity; I don’t remember Alice’s Restaurant well enough to answer that; and you’re tangenting again. Tell me about this goddamn dream.”

“Oh yeah.” He said, and when the clouds had come rolling back across his eyes, I was almost sorry to have brought it back up, better to have let him pursue that tangent, rehash a conversation we’d had in at least a dozen different disguises; but sometimes the role of a good friend is to make certain that the things which haunt your friends are confronted. “Well the first part of it scared the shit out of me, well maybe not the shit, but certainly the sweat. It was where that deja-vu sensation came in. I woke up dripping sweat, convinced that I’d lived, or at least dreamed, that before.” He took another sip of coffee and lit a cigarette before continuing.

“It was about her again; some girl who I’ve never seen before, but I know as my destiny. She was at a party over at Rob and Carol’s place, and somehow we summoned a demon from an antique couch of all the asinine things. At any rate, this demon took partial possession over me, except it didn’t have full control because there was some element missing, it was still restrained somehow, even though it was bound to me.

“It’s all a little bit fuzzy, but there were all sorts of vivid- and livid details, I’m pretty sure someone was killed, but I don’t know who. At any rate, we fled the party and found ourselves downtown, where we ducked into this old brownstone building where she lived and locked ourselves in the bathroom, because even though this demon was inside of me, it was still somehow looking for us.

“Fuck, I really wish I could explain it properly, because this shit had happened before; hiding in that bathroom from a demon that was half inside me, half still coming to find me. I told the girl that this had all happened before, and she agreed. Whatever it was that was coming to take over the rest of me, it was right outside the damn door when I woke up.”

He stopped there, ground his cigarette out against the glass sides of the ashtray, considered for a moment, and lit another one. I didn’t have the faintest idea what to say to him, so I lit a cigarette of my own and maintained my silence.

“Man, I woke up in a state of terror the likes of which I haven’t experienced in a long time. What was wild was that I didn’t want to turn on the lights or do anything to distract me from that dream; all I wanted to do was get back to sleep so I could get back in there and save her. I mean, I knew it was just a dream even as I was convinced, even upon waking, that I’d dreamed it before or had actually lived it somehow. I didn’t know what the fuck was going on, but I was totally certain that unless I got my ass back to sleep and got in there to do something, to save her, even though I was the other half of the demon outside the door, without me in there something horrible was actually going to occur. I needed to get back to sleep, back to that dream.” He took a drag from his smoke and laughed. “Before you ask, I haven’t seen any of the Nightmare on Elm St. movies in a long time.”

Jonah could tell that my laugh was forced, “I know I’m crazy” he said.

“Yeah,” I agreed “but shit, upon waking I’ve been convinced of all sorts of things.”

Jonah shook his head. “It was more than just that momentary confusion, I came fully awake, and even though I knew it was a dream I knew that simple fact didn’t matter.”

That light was in his eyes, the one I’d see every once in awhile when he’d get his teeth into a topic that seemed to transcend the absurdity which coated everything else in his universe. These were the moments I worried about him. A man needs convictions in order to exist, but Jonah’s convictions appeared at such odd moments and from such strange directions, that they seemed to present a danger to himself. It was in these moments that I could see quite clearly that man he would eventually become, and as a friend; it distressed me beyond words.

“Man, I was so wound up I don’t know how I got back to sleep, but I did, and of course it never works out the way it’s supposed to, so while I did manage to get back to the girl, it was years earlier, long before the demon and the bathroom scene even though we were now the same age as when all that shit had happened- or rather would happen, I guess.”

“Wild.” I said into the sudden silence.

“Yeah, and what was messed up was that she knew what was coming. I popped into this new dream at her work-place, my disreputable looking ass suddenly appearing in the middle of a fairly corporate setting, right in front of her eyes. After a moment of confusion, I could see the realization hitting her. It was like my presence cued it all up, and I got to watch her reactions as this- how to explain- movie from the future ran through her brain as she stared into my face – as if that makes any sense at all, anyway- we just stood there staring at each other for awhile, my dream but I swear she was more confused than I was- I was there under my own volition, and she was simply the imagery that stood for some facet of my unconscious self that I’d refused to let die, and yet in that moment it – that is whatever the hell she was standing for – saw me, became cognitively aware of the reasons I was there, and despite the danger I presented, smiled.”

”She saw that you cared,” I said “you’re telling me that you deliberately communicated with some normally inaccessible portion of your inner ideologies and proved your commitment to it?”

“Yeah - Shit – Perfect – Exactly Man.” That light in his eyes was blazing, “I hadn’t thought to put it into those words, but I think you’ve nailed it. I communicated something important to myself.”

Now, of course, I wish I had given that conversation half the thought I’ve given it since. Maybe I could have done something differently; I certainly should have seen where it was all going. I’ve been wracked with this strange guilt ever since I saw him, I’m pretty certain it was him, I couldn’t stand to get out of my car and check; I wouldn’t have had the faintest idea how to approach the situation if it had turned out to be Jonah trudging down the sidewalk, beard blowing in the wind, but I’m almost positive it was him, and the more I think about it, the more inevitable it all seems. I have to do something, but I don’t have the faintest idea what that something is.