Each morning I follow the same routine.
Before I leave my bed, I try to recall my dreams while they are still lucid. My
dreams have always been impatient creatures of the night, too elusive to pin
down for more than a few seconds.
You may ask why I bother with such a trivial
undertaking. You might think (and would probably be correct in doing so) that
dreams are unworthy of much concern. They are, after all, rather confusing and
nonsensical imaginings of a brain reluctant to follow the body into shutdown
mode. The mind still wants to play, even to the point of embarrassment and
beyond. Why should we care what it does when we have no control of it? Let it
have its fun and do not, by any means, place any credence in its bizarre ramblings.
If you must know, the reason I attempt to recollect
my dreams is that sometimes, though rarely I admit, my dreams allow me to do
the impossible.
In the last month alone, I have made wild
escapes from zombie-like beings while defending a maze of tunnels on a world
where this made perfect sense. For a short time, I became a resident in a house
of candles, where the lack of electricity was never questioned. Instead the
group of us (and I was young by the way) amused ourselves by hiding in the many
dark nooks and crannies of the place, never wanting to be found but still
fearing the dark. At another time, I was a soldier again, in the war fields of
Vietnam, wondering how I arrived in the country once more after so many years
away, and doubting that the luck of a reckless youth would follow an older man,
wise enough to know the anger of bullets.
More recently a theme has developed. My
dreams are curious to discover how I would react to circumstances in my past,
tweaked just enough to make the easy formidable and to make the safe dangerous.
I must admit to not passing these tests with flying colors. If it has become a
contest of sorts, a weird game with my sleepless brain acting as the rather
sadistic host, then I admit defeat. I am much too old to compete against such a
devious adversary.
Perhaps I’m beginning to give the impression
that the bad outweighs the good. It does not. My dream life often contains
incidents worth remembering. Just three weeks ago I was, at some point during
the night, in a sunlit field of almost unbearable beauty. I stood for the
longest time soaking in the glory about me. I knew something miraculous would
occur and it did. I soon felt myself rise above the windswept grass, not much,
maybe a foot above the earth, but it was enough. I found that I was able to
move be simply rotating my arms from front to back, as if I was pushing through
water. It was so effortless I remember laughing, and so real I was sure could
still air walk even when awake. And I tried. Oh yes, I tried, because if I did
it once I could surely do it again.
I have yet to revisit the field of my first
walk on air, but I have air walked twice since, and accomplished other feats of
amazement to boot.
Each morning I lie in bed and try to
remember my dreams. Often I shake my head in bewilderment, but sometimes I
capture an elusive wisp of wonder before it returns to the night.
On those mornings, I smile.
