On dreaming

...don't hold your breath, babe.

Dreams are funny things that never seem to materialize into anything you’d like to see happen when you wake up. Sure you might dream your closet is full of fresh new fun clothing you’re itching to try on, but the price for having that closet full is too much to risk in reality. Somehow it seams okay, or right, or even worth it when you’re dreaming, but the minute you wake up it’s obvious that you’re better off as you are.

I’ve been dreaming a lot lately. I’ve rationalized that it’s the medication…or lack thereof. But in truth it’s a feeling you get right after you finish something, and right before you do something else. Something big. Life changing, you could say. And then the dreams begin and you wake up endlessly reminded of what you don’t have yet, or what you don’t have anymore.

The things you never had in the first place aren’t worth a second thought. Like that closet full of clothes. As if you’re some celebrity relative. Able to bypass the crushing insecurity and loss of privacy so that you can leach money off an imagined “cousin’s” hard work. And believe me, popularity is hard work. Not anything I’m interested in. But I’ve never had that opportunity. So when I wake up, it only elicits a smile over how cool it would be to be rich and unemployed, and then the moment’s passed.

Dreaming of actual events or people you’ve had a relationship with, however, is it’s own sort of hell. Wondering whether or not you could’ve saved something from happening, how it might’ve turned out had you done the things you’d done in your dream. Had you been given the chance to do them. Seeing their face as if they were lying in bed next to you going off about work, or a football game, or their mom. And then still not seeing it, in the way dreams let you recognize a person for who they are, but never leave you in absolute assurance that it’s him/her. The nuances of their face a fuzzy plaque that seems insincere.

And that is exactly what it is, a lie. Upon waking you’re plagued with thoughts of retribution against your own subconscious. Popping Benadryl, getting hammered, not sleeping. Anything to stop the dream from returning again and forcing emotional shit down your throat repeatedly. Building your hopes and then blasting them with buck-shot and you watch as bits of your self you’ve struggled to preserve explode and splatter wetly agianst the wall of your waking psyche.

I hate my dreams right now. I hate what they make me feel. But tomorrow they might be gone. And in a month I’ll forget what they even were. By then I’ll be doing that something I’m waiting to do now. Where only the current occupies my mind…

Well, one can hope.