(Thomas Froese)
(The Hamilton Spectator – Saturday, August 15, 2026)
We drove from all over on a Saturday to meet in Niagara. I doubt anyone expected to hear anything about dreams.
I arrived to sit beside a youth, a leader in training younger than Dawson. He told me he knew Dawson from camp. Hundreds sat to our right and hundreds to our left.
I’d never met Dawson, but had volunteered at the camp where he died. I’ve taught at the school where he studied.
We then listened to the stories. Tears mixed with strange peace, or at least something approaching peace. This is how it is with some funerals, the ones worth their salt, the ones that can speak to listening ears beyond their walls.
There, on the large screen, is Dawson, a natural athlete already as a boy. He’s running track. Look at the medals. Now the strapping young man is being baptized in the lake at the camp he loved so much. Now he’s at mission school in Costa Rica.
Hockey was his other love. Growing up, he’d always played high-calibre. From Redeemer University, where he studied physical education, his teammates sit nearby wearing their jerseys. There’s his family. His parents. His sister. His closest friends. “I thought I’d say these things at his wedding,” said one.
We listened. There were songs, so bittersweet. And prayers.
Now I lay me down to sleep. That’s how that old children’s prayer goes. One summer night at camp, Dawson laid himself down to sleep and never woke up. No foul play. No toxic substances. No self-harm. No seizure. No conclusion. That was the medical finding.
His mother’s courageous words at the microphone? “We may never know.”
Dawson Abrahams, the program director at Camp Crossroads, was 22. Before his birth, the family had lost a five-year-old girl to cerebral palsy. Dear God.
Last summer a young leader from another Ontario camp died in a highway crash. Then another young man from that camp died from a fallen tree branch.
This is the news. Life is short and death is complete. Look at today’s obituaries. The only good from any of it seems to come if you let your certain death quicken the blood and sharpen the senses to your own given days, to do something with them.
At that microphone, Dawson’s pastor Bill said such things. There’s a time to be born and a time to die. Then he shared his dream. Not a dream of anyone flying, or falling, or being naked as humans are. This dream is about hand-to-hand combat.
“It was vivid,” he said, describing the chaos of ancient battle. Imagine some movie. There’s the noise and fear and dust and blood mixed with confusion. You may not even know who’s on your side, never mind which way to go.
So you look for the banner, the visual anchor always carried by an elite soldier, the signifer. Find the banner and find the way. And there, in this dream, Dawson is carrying the banner and calling, “This is the way!”
After waking, Bill then made a banner in honour of Dawson’s life. Because some dreams don’t need interpretation. They just need to be remembered. Now I lay me down to sleep. Now I dream. Now the veil between earth and heaven is thinning.
The young man beside me was then gone, and we, the throng, then poured out to our cars and homes and summer gardens to think about it. Someday there will be no more tears or death or battles. Somehow time itself will disappear.
Now I lay me down to sleep. Tonight and tomorrow and 10,000 more nights for most of us. Then the big sleep and that endless dream beyond the sea, the big dream that’s like the first day of summer break. School’s finished. Now the holidays.
Some days you wonder if it’s not all too far beyond belief. Those same days you wonder how anyone could believe anything less.