All That You Dream

Since May is Mental Health Awareness Month, I’d like to share my brother, Woody, with you. If you’re not yet familiar with him, here’s an introduction. Perhaps more than anyone else I know, Woody is a guy who understands the importance of dreams. Two examples:

Woody will be 65 in November. He’s never driven and never will. Nevertheless, one of the dreams that sustained him for years was getting his driver’s license. After that, he planned to purchase a Hummer limousine so he could drive family members and friends anywhere they wanted to go.

More recently, he’s sustained by the dream that he and his girlfriend, Sheri, who lives in another group home, will get married. He informed me when I went to visit him in the rehab facility where he’s recuperating from a bout of pneumonia (see the photos above), that he and Sheri don’t plan to have children. They’re going to have pets, instead.

Aside from the fact that Woody’s old enough to be at least a grandfather, he has Klinefelter syndrome. Males with Klinefelter syndrome have an extra X chromosome, resulting in a total of 47 chromosomes instead of the usual 46. It can affect physical, language, and social development. And it typically causes infertility. But it doesn’t prevent dreaming.

Perspective

The impossibility of driving and having children are things that bother normal people. Normal people don’t take their dreams seriously enough to live in them. That’s why they’re bothered. Woody has no idea he’s not normal. If he were aware, he likely wouldn’t choose to be normal. Some prices are just too high to pay, and dreams aren’t negotiable.

In his 1968 novel, A Fan’s Notes, the late Frederick Exley, wrote about:

Woody’s never read A Fan’s Notes. But he understands Exley’s notion as well as Exley did. Mental Health Awareness Month, indeed.

Perhaps more than anyone else I know, Woody is a guy who understands if you don’t have dreams, all you have is nightmares.