It’s not difficult to analyze this dream: my father has been kidnapped, and I’m trying to rescue him from his kidnappers. I finally track them down, two men dressed in oversized sweatshirts like frat boys, holding my father captive in the corner of a restaurant. They decide to return him to me because they think he is dead, slumped over on a square wood table. I know better, although he has become very sick and old in his captivity, and has shrunk to the size of a 10-year-old. He opens one eye to look at me, to confirm he’s not really dead.
I leave with him on my back, holding his arms over my shoulders, half carrying him, half dragging him away from the restaurant onto a bus where I know his kidnappers won’t be able to follow us. Sitting on the bus seat where I’ve managed to set him down, my father finally speaks to me. I can’t remember what he says.
I remembered this dream in yoga while squeezing my body into twisted chair pose, a pose that’s incredibly challenging because I don’t have flexibility in my Achilles tendons—surgery, scar tissue. I twisted and tried to breathe, and I suddenly remembered carrying my sick father away from a certain death. I remembered saving him, his body on my back.
Which makes a certain kind of sense: in twisted chair, I focus on my Achilles tendons, imagine lengthening them so I can sit even a third as deeply as everyone else seems to be able to sit. And when I think of my Achilles, I often think of my father, how he would hold my feet in his hands, moving and stretching them, how he would ask about my scars on the phone, how he took me to doctor after doctor throughout my childhood to make sure I was walking properly.
On first remembering, twisting my body awkwardly, trying to breathe, I read my dream as wanting so badly to save my father from death, to carry him away from death’s kidnapping.
But now I also see it as a reminder not to forget him, to carry him with me. In my dream, he was much smaller than he was in real life, hardly weighed anything at all. And he winked at me. Making sure I knew he was okay.
Planet of the Blind 
You love and cherish your father very much, as do I. Thanks for sharing this dream. It helped to remind me not to take for granted the precious time I can spend with my father now.
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