Note: The title is nicked from one of Stephen King's short stories.
That Feeling, You Can Only Say What It Is In French
When he falls asleep, he is a completely different person, and that's okay. He supposes that everyone is a different person within the sweet containment of their forever alive subconscious. Bank clerks are astronauts, school principals are basketball stars, and he is a timid, fragile mouse of a man with a dissatisfied alcoholic wife and three resentful children.
It seems wrong, somehow.
He'd prefer to sleep and dream about monsters or dragons, airplanes and losing his son at the shopping mall. He wants syrupy dreams about the golden retriever his daughter has her eye set on, or the night he proposed to his wife. He wants the slightly sour tang of the bar fight he got into when he was twenty-two, or the misty haze of his recurrent sexual fantasies. He wants to give it to Bettie Page in a back alley, he wants to run his thumbs over Jane Fonda's hardened nipples and lick her soft belly until she squeals, and he wants to do it in the only place he can, the only place where it will be perfect and real—but not too real, because Lorraine hates it when his eyes follow Raquel Welch's perfect bounce and sway too intently.
Instead, he lives another man's life… except that other man is him, really, unhappy and lonely and scared of getting older. His wife doesn't care whether he shows too much interest in a famous girl's titties, his kids have given up all hopes of ever getting a dog, and his youngest son stares at him sometimes with the most humiliating expression of pity and exasperation. He's still young enough to look up to his father, but he doesn't. And there's no reason he should; there is nothing about this man worthy of admiring. Sometimes, in his dreams, he stares at the bags under his dream-eyes, the lines around his dream-mouth, and the hunch in his dream-shoulders and thinks it would be a blessing if one night he could just slit his dream-wrists.
When he wakes up, he is bombarded by real life—but that's just the trouble; his dreams are real in a way that would make his wife very angry if he had been dreaming about Raquel or Jane or Bettie. When he wakes up, it almost feels as if he's slipping from one dream to another, as if they are interchangeable realities. But he tries not to think about it too much, except to chuckle a little over what a good story it could make, for the right author of course. Because it's just plain scary, and he hates to think that his life could have been so unhappy.
Sometimes he looks at his youngest son, Marty, with his soft brown hair and snub nose that remind him so much of his beautiful wife, and thinks that he's seen him somewhere before. He almost thinks that he knew him back when the earth was new, when his biology paper was the scariest thing in the world, second only to talking to one of those fluffed and giggling girls that lined the school hallways, that leaned against lockers and squealed mysteriously, that disappeared into the bathrooms after lunch to touch up their make-up and have a quick, lady-like smoke. So many of his memories of that time have dissipated much like the thick blue-black haze that patient young women would fan out the windows between classes, but there's a face and a boy that seem to slip in and out of his peripheral vision, deliberately taunting and teasing him, daring him to remember. And he does remember certain things: a smell like new leather, chocolate milk kisses, and a touch that somehow manages to overshadow any woman's curves. He feels embarrassed at those thoughts, and when he stares at his son, all he can feel is a dual lump of guilt and love in his throat and he doesn't know why. He doesn't want to fail Marty, the way the man he is in his dreams so plainly failed his children, and he doesn't want to associate his child with half-remembered, shameful sexual experimentation. It is uncomfortable, and it makes his dreams become nightmares of aching want and wishes and wasted life. Of a lower middle class existence so unsatisfying and unhappy that he has simply given up. Of being bullied by everyone, of asking for nothing and receiving it night after night. He wakes up, after those dreams, and hears his mother's voice in his ears saying "the meek shall inherit the Earth, George, just you wait" and he thinks that if that's true, then he will never be meek, not in the life he can control. And he will tell his children that submission is true failure and that dreams are everything.
So long as you dream of being a rock star or president or famous writer. If you dream about living in your private hell or making love to a boy faded from existence, you're better off pretending those dreams never happened.
And he does. And one day he is reading the newspaper and drinking a glass of orange juice slowly by the light of the sluggishly rising autumn sun, when his too-cool-for-you seventeen year old Marty strolls into the kitchen, picks up an apple, and runs it under the tap for a moment before drying it on his shirt. George opens his mouth to say "good morning" but what wants to come out is "I love you" and suddenly he knows why. Marty, in his t-shirt and blue jeans, carries a smell like a new leather jacket and an airy self-confidence that makes his own words die in his throat. When his son's hand rests lightly on his upper arm, he can do nothing but gawp at his child and his object of adolescent adoration, so long-lasting that he presses his knees together out of habit. Images blur and merge and resign themselves to being a sweet-faced, impish teenage boy with his mother's nose. This vision bends and warps itself over George like a realization as a kiss is pressed to the top of his head and smooth fingers run through the thin strands of his greying hair. Child and imaginary lover become one and the same as Marty bites into his apple, chews, swallows, and tips his head to gently kiss his father's lips, licking away the thick taste of chocolate milk.
And George McFly feels himself being slowly and painfully torn in two.