Ghosted by dream ghosts

The ghost of my father comes to me in dreams sometimes, and in my sleep he's the same as he was in life: blond, blue-eyed, expansive and handsome, with a joke on his lips, and laughter that fills the room. He's also just as reckless and demanding. In my dreams, he barges in unexpectedly, by phone, tells me he's in town and expects me to drop everything to meet him at a local bar despite my having long-made plans to vacation in Switzerland or Brazil. "Come on, Fish Head," he says. "I'm only gonna be in town for the day. You can delay your flight for your dad."How can I refuse a dead man? I spend the remainder of the dream trying to find him, but he's never where he says he'll be. My father's ghost ghosts me (I resist the urge to make a pun on our last name here), and I wake angry, with him and myself. This summer I'm hosting a memoir workshop for the first time, and it has me thinking about the arc of the story of my relationship with my father. In fiction, there's an expected trajectory to a storyline: The conflict and tension builds until the protagonist faces off against the antagonist in a long-awaited showdown. Then: a tidy resolution. I wonder if we're drawn to these stories time and time again because in life there often are no tidy resolutions. For example, chances are slim to negative that the guy who wronged me in high school will go to therapy, reflect on his life, realize what a schmuck he was, find me and apologize. This is maybe why it feels so darn satisfying when Hermione smacks the sneering, smirking Malfoy across the face in "Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban," though, as a rule, I don't condone violence as a method of conflict resolution. Likewise, as much as it would bring me peace, it's not likely I'm going to have the kind of revelatory dream Chadwick Boseman's character has about his father in the "Black Panther" movie. I'm not a superhero, my life isn't a Marvel comic, and my dad, even in dreams, is an unreliable narrator. I'm my memoir workshop, we've discussed whether or not it's appropriate to write about our friends and family. As a memoirish columnist, I tend to follow Anne Lamott's advice: "You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better."Still, there are stories I don't tell and maybe never will. It's easier to write about my dad now that he's on the other side, and, in a way, the stories I write become that tidy resolution I never had in real life. I get to choose the ending. I could end with the time my dad called me, drunk, and apologized for abandoning me when I was 7. "I loved you so much," he said. "I just didn't know how to divorce. I thought I had to leave everything behind."His heart was failing, and doctors had given him six months to live. He asked me to sprinkle his ashes around his mother's grave. That's a kind of resolution, isn't it?But I'd intended to have a conversation with him about it while he was sober, but I never summoned that elusive courage, and he died in a car wreck before I had the chance. In a more recent dream, my dad and I sat side by side on a tropical beach watching the sea swallow the dusky sun. We were drinking margaritas, but I wasn't worrying about his sobriety. I was just so happy to see him again, to find him there. He turned toward me and said something funny, and I woke myself up laughing. Yeah, I think I'd end there. Tricia Caspers is an award-winning writer and writing instructor. Follow her on Facebook at @patriciacaspers.