Two dreams.

• Author: Kronman, Anthony T.
• Position: Of Yale Law School professor Robert Burt - Testimonial

The week after Bo died, I dreamt about him twice. The first dream was very short. The second was longer and picked up where the first one left off. I can't recall ever having had two continuous dreams of this kind before. But I felt a tremendous excitement when the second dream began. That's because the first dream was the start of a conversation with Bo and I had another question I was desperate to ask. Describing one's dreams in public carries obvious risks. But I know that Bo, of all people, would have wanted me to go on.

The first dream, as I say, was a short one. I was standing in a room with some other people. I looked over and there was Bo. He seemed tired as one might after a long trip. He was covered with a fine white dust. I remember thinking, "He must have been walking on a long, dry road." "Are you back?" I asked, and Bo replied, "Only for a while." And that was it.

In my second dream, I was in the same room and Bo was there again, but this time the dream lasted long enough for me to get an answer to the question I was burning to ask. I wanted Bo to tell me what it's like to be dead. He looked at me and said, "You wouldn't believe how many people are there." He seemed surprised to have discovered this, but not disheartened. If anything, he looked pleased to have found so many companions in death. After I woke I reflected that perhaps this was because Bo had already met some with whom he could continue the conversation that was for him the highest if always imperfect expression of life. And that made me think of Socrates's concluding speech in Plato's Apology, which Bo and I had taught years before and discussed countless times since. After being sentenced to death, Socrates remained strangely calm. How could a man facing death be so serene? Sensing the anxiety especially of his friends, Socrates explained that if death isn't a dreamless sleep (which wouldn't be so bad, he said, after the tempests of life), then all his predecessors--all the great thinkers and poets of the past-would be there waiting for him and what joy it would be to ask them the questions that had gotten him into such trouble while he was alive! The astonishment with which Bo reported his discovery that so many people were already dead made me think, on waking, that in my dream Bo had become Socrates himself, which to those of us who knew and loved him will not seem an implausible confusion.

But that wasn't all. I had one last question to ask and Bo's answer...