“Old Men Shall Dream Dreams”

May 19, 2026

It was sometime in the mid-1980s, long before I became a police officer, that I had both dreams.

In the first, I was standing in the middle of Vanderbilt Avenue in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, where I grew up. Or rather, a dream-version of it. The buildings were taller. Wider. The street itself seemed stretched into something almost mythological. It was evening. Everything was burning.

Not one building. Not one block. 

Everything.

The air was thick with soot and orange light. Fire engines and police cars raced past in every direction. Sirens screamed endlessly, not with urgency anymore, but almost with panic. Yet what disturbed me most were not the flames.

It was the wheelbarrows.

People were pushing wheelbarrows filled with the bodies of dead police officers and firefighters. There was no formation. No ceremony. No command post. No order at all. Just movement. Human beings trying desperately to clear space for the living by moving the dead out of the way.

Even now, decades later, that image remains with me.

The second dream was entirely different.

I found myself attending an elegant cocktail gathering in a Manhattan high-rise. Timeless New York. Velvet evening atmosphere. Jazz somewhere in the distance. Something almost Ellington-like about the room. Sophisticated. Sublime. Powerful.

The strange thing was my host.

He was enormous — perhaps nine feet tall — hooded like a medieval monk. I could not see his face. Yet he did not frighten me. Quite the opposite. Standing beside him, I felt completely protected. The sort of irrational safety one feels as a child beside an immensely powerful parent. I remember thinking quite clearly: Who would dare bother me if I am his guest?

He escorted me into the room, then prepared to leave my side.

Before doing so, however, he placed a scroll upon a nearby table and warned me emphatically not to open it under any circumstances.

Under any circumstances.

It was the closest I came to seeing beneath the hood.

Then he turned and disappeared into the crowd.

Naturally, I waited only until he was a respectable distance away before opening the scroll.

On it was a number:

1119.

That was all.

No symbols. No Latin. No prophecy. No gothic script. Just four ordinary numbers on an ordinary piece of paper.

I remember even in the dream feeling vaguely disappointed.

That’s it?

Years passed.

In 1991, after serving as an Auxiliary Police Officer, I became a police officer in the City of New York. Life unfolded. Careers formed. Time accelerated the way it always does when one is busy becoming oneself.

Then eventually one number revealed itself.

515.

May 15th.

National Peace Officers Memorial Day in the United States.

I recognized it immediately when the connection finally occurred to me.

The second number took longer.

Many years later, while sitting in my office building the Line of Duty database for fallen and injured members of the NYPD, I suddenly froze mid-conversation and turned toward my partner, then Detective Marie Alexis-Torok.

My eyes must have widened because she looked immediately concerned.

“1119,” I said. “It’s 9/11/01 reversed.”

She knew the dream already. I had told her about it years earlier. I only had to remind her briefly.

Then we both sat there quietly for a moment.

Now let me be very clear.

I am not claiming prophecy.

Human beings are pattern-seeking creatures. Broken clocks, as the saying goes, are right twice a day. Carl Jung spoke of what he called the Collective Unconscious — the possibility that human beings may share symbolic structures and emotional undercurrents beneath ordinary awareness. Perhaps enormous historical events radiate outward psychologically before they fully materialize. Or perhaps coincidence simply enjoys dramatic timing.

I honestly do not know.

But I do know this:

Those dreams shaped me.

Especially after September 11th.

From 2002 until my retirement in June of 2025, I served as liaison to the families of police officers killed or catastrophically injured in the line of duty. Nearly a quarter century. Funerals. Hospitals. Memorials. Financial crises. Grief. Bureaucracy. Tears. Silence. Children standing beside folded flags not fully understanding what had just happened to their lives.

And every year came Police Week.

Every year came Washington.

Every year came the reading of names.

Over time, however, I noticed something difficult and deeply human.

Outside the surviving families, the circle of remembrance gradually narrows.

For a few years after September 11th, the country’s attention remained intensely fixed upon police officers, firefighters, sacrifice, and service. Memorials overflowed. Flags appeared everywhere. The names of the fallen felt woven into the national consciousness itself.

But time does what time always does.

New crises emerge. New headlines arrive. New generations inherit tragedies they did not personally witness. Eventually, for many Americans, May 15th quietly receded back into symbolic observance rather than lived emotional reality.

But not for the families.

For them, the loss does not become historical. It remains present tense.

The surviving spouse still reaches across the bed some mornings into emptiness. Children grow into adulthood carrying memories assembled from photographs, stories, and folded flags. Parents continue calculating the age their son or daughter would have been today. Holidays still contain absences invisible to everyone else in the room.

That is one of the hidden truths of line-of-duty death:

The ceremony ends for the public long before it ends for the family.

And perhaps that is why remembrance matters so deeply.

Not merely as ritual.

But as resistance against forgetting.

This year was the first year in all that time that I was not intimately involved in the preparations for Police Week.

For the first time in decades, I stood outside the machinery of remembrance rather than within it.

And perhaps that is why these dreams returned to me now.

Not because I believe I was shown the future.

But because memory itself behaves strangely when a life chapter closes.

We spend so much of youth imagining that purpose arrives dramatically — like lightning, prophecy, destiny descending from the heavens fully formed.

But often purpose reveals itself only backward.

Only after years.

Only after grief.

Only after service.

Only after one suddenly realizes that the strange images and symbols that haunted youth were quietly shaping the architecture of an entire life.

I no longer concern myself much with whether the dreams were supernatural, psychological, symbolic, or accidental.

At my age, the more important question is different:

What did they ask of me?

And I believe the answer was simple.

To serve.

To remember the dead.

To stand beside the living.

And perhaps, above all, to never become so cynical that I lose reverence for the mysterious ways human beings sometimes find meaning in the midst of fire.