Dreaming of Dad and Coffee Online
Updated: Sep 18
In the dream, my dad and me were trying to make a pot of coffee online.
That sentence sounds wrong in the best possible way. It has dream logic, family logic, and computer logic all mixed together. Dad was trying to stick a picture in the side of the computer, as if the machine had a mail slot or a secret door. I told him I needed to go inside and code it for the picture to show up on the page.
He died before he really learned about computers. Still, there he was, working beside me.
The dream stayed with me because it was funny, tender, and strange. It brought back the kind of problems we never got to solve together. It also gave me something I did not know I needed, another morning with him, another small task, another chance to say, “Let me show you how this works.”
Some dreams bring people back through ordinary work
Grief does not always arrive as a dramatic wave. Sometimes it comes in work clothes.
It comes while fixing a sink, measuring a board, sorting old tools, or opening a program that would have confused someone you loved. It shows up in small questions.
How would Dad have handled this?
What would he have said if he saw this phone?
Would he have laughed at me for talking to a machine?
In my dream, we were not sitting in a field of golden light. He was not giving me a grand message from beyond the clouds. We were trying to make coffee appear online, which is exactly the kind of ridiculous project a dream would choose.
The beauty of it was in the normalness. We had a job to do. We had a misunderstanding to work through. He was present, and I was explaining.
That is what I miss most about people who are gone. Not only the big holidays or the rare deep talks, but the ordinary teamwork. Holding the other end of something. Reading instructions out loud. Standing in the kitchen while coffee sputters. Trying to understand what the other person means.
Dad did not need to understand computers for the dream to feel true. He only needed to be himself, willing to help, even if he thought a picture could be pushed into the side of a computer like a postcard into a mailbox.
That detail made me smile after I woke up. It also made my chest ache.
Because he missed so much.
He missed the way the internet became normal in every house. He missed pages, uploads, passwords, pop-ups, video calls, and pictures that travel across the world in seconds. He missed the age when everyone had to learn at least a little bit of computer language just to get through daily life.
Yet in the dream, he had not missed it completely. He came to the lesson late, but he came.
A picture in the side of the computer says a lot
Dreams often use objects the way poems do. They turn one thing into several things at once.
The picture Dad tried to stick in the computer was just a picture. It was also memory. It was proof. It was the past trying to enter the present.
Computers make that seem easy now. We drag, drop, scan, upload, attach, save, and share. A photo can move from paper to screen so quickly that we forget how strange the whole process is.
To someone who learned life through hands, tools, paper, wood, metal, and machines with visible parts, the internet can seem like a trick. Where does the picture go? Where is the page? What does it mean to put something “online”? If the coffee is online, can you drink it? If the photo is on a page, where is the page kept?
Dad’s dream solution was physical. He had a picture, and the computer was the thing that needed it. So he tried to put one inside the other.
There is a kind of wisdom in that mistake. He understood that something had to cross over. He just did not know the door.
I told him I needed to go inside and code it.
That line feels funny too, because no one goes inside a computer in the body. Still, that is how coding can feel to someone who does it. You go behind the page. You enter a hidden room where plain-looking words make visible things happen. You change a line, and suddenly a picture appears. You close a tag, and the whole page stops falling apart. You fix a path, and the image that was missing comes home.
To Dad, the front of the computer was the whole machine. To me, the screen is only the front porch. Behind it are folders, files, languages, and small laws that decide what appears.
The dream let us meet in the middle.
He brought the picture. I brought the code.
Technology changes, but helping still feels the same
I sometimes wonder how I would teach him now.
I would start with the mouse, probably. I would say, “Move this, then click once. No, not too hard. You do not have to hold it down.” He would overdo it at first. Many people do. Then he would learn the rhythm.
I would show him how a photo gets from paper to screen. I would explain scanning, then maybe taking a picture with a phone. The phone part would bother him and impress him at the same time.
Then I would show him a web page.
“This is not paper,” I would say, “but it acts like paper in some ways.”
He would say something practical, maybe, “Can you print it?”
And I would laugh, because of course that would be his question.
Teaching someone technology is rarely just about technology. It is about patience, trust, and vocabulary. One person must admit they do not know. The other person must remember what it felt like not to know.
That is harder than it sounds.
People who use computers every day forget how unreal the basics are. A file is not a file in the old sense. A folder does not hold weight. A page is not made of paper. A cloud is not in the sky. A window is not glass. A cursor blinks, but it is not alive.
The language of computers borrows from the physical world, then bends every borrowed word. No wonder Dad tried to use a physical answer.
I hope dream-me was patient. I hope I did not rush him. I hope I said, “That almost makes sense, but this is how we do it.”
That is the tone I wish I could bring to more of life.
Patience is love when someone is learning. It is also love when someone is grieving. We learn both slowly, and we make mistakes with both.
Coffee makes the dream feel even more like home
The coffee part matters.
Coffee is not only a drink in many families. It is a ritual, a smell, a sound, a reason to sit at the table for five more minutes. It is the thing that happens before the work begins and after the work is done.
A pot of coffee says someone is staying.
In the dream, we were trying to make a pot of coffee online. That makes no real-world sense, but emotionally it makes perfect sense. I spend so much of my life online now. I write there. I build there. I fix things there. I talk to people there. I make pages that appear on screens instead of on paper.
So my mind gave Dad a way to join me.
It did not bring him into a place he would have fully understood. It brought him into my place, then gave us coffee so it still felt like home.
That is what dreams can do. They create a bridge without asking permission from time.
Maybe the coffee was the past, and the computer was the present. Maybe the picture was memory, and the code was translation. Maybe Dad’s confusion was not the point at all. Maybe the point was that he was willing to stand beside me in a world that arrived after him.
I do not want to over-explain it. Some dreams lose their glow when pinned down too tightly. This one can stay a little mysterious.
Still, I keep returning to the image of him trying to help. Not from a distance. Not as an idea. There beside the computer, working the problem in his own way.
That is how love often survives after death. It does not always come as a clear voice. It comes as a gesture. It comes as a task. It comes as a dream where the person is still themselves.
The people we lose keep working with us
When someone dies, the world keeps updating.
New tools arrive. New words appear. New habits become normal. The person we lost stays fixed in the time they left, at least in the visible world. They never get the newer phone. They never learn the newer car controls. They never see the kitchen remodeled or the kids grown tall or the old neighborhood changed.
That can feel cruel.
It creates a list of things they missed, and the list never stops growing.
But memory has its own strange way of updating. The dead remain connected to the living because we keep carrying them into new rooms. We ask what they would think. We borrow their sayings. We use their tools. We cook their food. We tell their stories to people they never met.
Sometimes, we dream them into the future.
In that sense, Dad did learn something about computers. Not while he was alive, not in the usual way, but inside me. I learned, and some part of him came with me. His way of working, his way of trying, his hands-on answer to an invisible problem, all of that lives in how I remember him.
Maybe that is why the dream felt less like a visit and more like a collaboration.
He was not only watching me code. He was part of the scene. He had his own idea, wrong but sincere. I had mine, technical but still playful. Between us sat the machine, the picture, and the impossible coffee.
That is enough for one dream to give.
Waking up with gratitude and a little ache
After a dream like that, waking up can feel unfair.
For a few seconds, the person was there. Then the room returns. The day begins. The coffee is real, but they are not at the table.
Still, I am grateful.
I am grateful my mind gave me a version of Dad who was curious. I am grateful it gave me a problem to solve with him. I am grateful the dream kept his misunderstanding gentle, not humiliating. I am grateful it let me explain something to him, because he spent so much of his life explaining things to me.
The dream did not erase grief. It did not answer every question. It did not make loss neat.
It gave me one more small memory, even if that memory happened after he was gone.
There is comfort in that.
Maybe love keeps coding itself into the page long after the original file is missing. Maybe memory finds the image path somehow. Maybe the people we lose still appear in the margins, not because we called them up perfectly, but because some part of us is still building with them.
I can still see Dad with that picture, trying to push it into the side of the computer. I can still hear myself telling him I needed to go inside and code it so it would show up on the page.
And I can still feel the best part.
He was there. He was helping. We were making coffee.
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