A surface and brief mention or discussion of nightmares follows.
There is a word in our language for dreams that cause you terror, dreams that rip at you and drag you gasping to break the surface of wakefulness. I don’t think any of us have ever gone our lives without experiencing such a dream. I think we’ve all felt that horrible sensation of a dream curling around a wrist, a neck, across eyes.
That’s a nightmare, yes?
What has been on my mind lately is something else. Something I experience too much, too often. Too regularly do I wake up from a dream that did not have dream-like logic, that had some smack of reality to it, that spoke to me of things I knew already, and things that I accept as true. Too often am I roused from sleep and feel relief that I no longer live in that place, for a small sliver of time, where I feel myself crushed under sadness so overwhelming.
It’s always points of comparisons. It’s seeing the person I could have been, or talking to the me who went to university early, or the me who never lost my faith. It’s talking to another artist whose life is full of sex and popularity and success. It’s about talking with a friend who tells me things I fear are already true, with my own respect chaining my jaw so I cannot respond. It’s awful but it’s not… terrifying. It’s not fear that makes me wake.
I just want out of that life, and I get into this one.