Just Dreaming


I went to bed thinking, tossing and turning, generally having trouble falling to sleep and I regained consciousness aware that I was still thinking. And in the two hours or so in between I had dreams filled with dead people.

My father was there, and an uncle, and on the TV Riddick Bowe was fighting for the heavyweight championship of boxing. I drove my father’s Army Jeep called a Kennedy, which long sat rusting away in front of our house after my father died. And I walked my ancestors’ land where there were no roads, just rice paddies, rivers, and mudbanks all covered by great coconut trees.

If I was superstitious I’d say the spirit of our elders are trying to talk to me. But I am a spiritual person and I believe the dead have problems of their own. Surely they will not be troubled my mundane affairs such as breaking up with my gf.

I am not learned in Freud’s theories about dreams and the inner consciousness but I believe dreams are our own creations. I often find the meaning in my dreams as simply stating my reality in metaphorical ways.

And what did I learn from my dream last night? That some things are no longer with us. Not dead and forgotten. Surely not forgotten. But no matter how real the dream may seem, it is still a dream. When you wake up you realize it wasn’t true.

The great paradox of dreams is that even though you’re aware of some things to be contrary to reality, while you’re dreaming you believe what you see to be absolutely true. That scenario of a person trying to pinch himself to check if it is a dream doesn’t happen in dreams. When you’re in a dream, you don’t question things, you just experience it.

And in the past my most vivid dreams often come after losing something important. Like when I lost my first celphone to a thief, I often had dreams that I still have my celphone and that it was not stolen after all. In that case my attachment to something manifested in my dreams. It’s my mind’s futile attempt to deny my loss.

No, my dream tonight was not that blatant. I didn’t dream that I still have my gf. She wasn’t even on it. Apparently my mind has learned to dream in subtler ways.