What Dreams May Come

     I don’t enjoy my dreams. I never have. In fact I can only remember three, maybe four really good dreams I have ever had in my life. It is so weird, and yet just a part of my life that I accept. I know people that talk about beautiful dreams they have, and often. I actually know people who can direct their dreams, choose what they want to dream about, and stay in their dreams to completion until they wake up! They can dream a real story from beginning to end, and if by chance, the dream begins to go wrong they can tell themselves it’s just a dream and they need to wake up, and they do!
     My dreams are just a hodge-podge. Disjointed and chaotic, they go from one thing to the next. They flit around like schizophrenic, indecisively crazed birds. The irrational seemingly perfectly rational. Many, many times they are about me just trying to get from point A to point B. The frustration becomes overwhelming at times. Sometimes I am actually headed down the road in a car, lost, but trying to figure out some landmark that I can recognize. Suddenly the car I am driving gets absurdly smaller and smaller until it is no bigger than a child’s pedal car. I am riding so close to the road that I can see the actual pebbles and pavement cracks as close as the lines in the palm of my own hand. I am always trying to figure something out, always trying to work out the details. And I get so close. Always working feverishly, but I never reach my destination. Not always, but quite often I am completely alone.
    Sometimes the dreams are so lonely with pieces of streets and neighborhoods from my childhood. In these it is always night, but I can feel and see colors. There is unspoken danger and there is fear, but I don’t know why. I do know if I can just get a few streets over I will be in the right place and it will all be okay. But I never can. Something or someone always gets in my way, and then I have to figure out how to get around that obstacle. Once I have figured that one out another one immediately pops up. It is always like I am a hamster on a wheel, never getting where I need to be.
    And they flicker incessantly from one thing to the next like images on a screen. If I could just settle into one scenario from beginning to end that would be blessed relief, but they always change to some other weirdly distorted scenario half way through, as though a demented screenplay writer lives in my subconscious flinging out random, yet frustratingly unfinished story-lines, one after another.
     This morning as I was swimming up towards consciousness I was actually talking to myself about it all, and yet still dreaming too. Either God or my brain told me that I live within the minutia in my dreams, because I live within the minutia of my life. I micro-manage and hold on so tightly in the day that it follows me into the night. Is it true? Was it a message from God? Am I really wound that tight? And if I am, how sad is that?     Is it like this for others? I mean, I know dreams are not like they show them in the movies and on T.V. but do most people look forward to their dreams like a good book? What would that be like? I know that it is possible, because I have talked to people who feel that way. If it is really true how do they not become dream addicts? I would. If I could control my dreams like that, it would be like a holodeck for me. I would forever be trying to get to sleep by dusk….Maybe that is why I am not allowed to have it.
     But, would it be so outrageous to be able to have a really good dream once in a while? Every now and then I actually dream I am in an old Victorian type farm house. It is wonderful, and somehow I have come to own it. I begin exploring and it is amazing with deliciously awesome things everywhere I look. The very kinds of things I love in the real world. But when I get up to the attic there are always bad things, very bad things…the attic is fine to a certain point, but then it becomes so huge and I can feel the vastness of it, and feel what is way off in the dark. It always ruins it. Every time! Other times when I do get to experience joy or beauty it quickly morphs into such a strangeness, and sometimes even down right absurdity!
    I once heard that dreams are your brain’s way of dumping the garbage from your mind at the end of each day, like emptying the recycle bin on your computer. And, that if you didn’t dream you could get sick, maybe mentally ill. Because dreams are the valve release on your subconscious; like the valve on a pressure cooker. Dreams are your brain’s way of venting. If that is true, I sure dump a lot of weird stuff out of my head every night. I wonder where it goes. Is it floating around out there in the ether? If that’s true I just hope no one stumbles upon it by mistake.
     But if the message I got from my brain, or God or however it came, is true, if I let go more in the day time and ease up on the needle-tight need to fix and control, will my dreams change? If I live freer and gentler with myself and others in reality, will my dreams become more beautiful at night? It is an interesting thought and certainly worth exploring. I do try to go more gently each day. I feel deeply that God is changing and molding me every day into a calmer more peaceful human being. And I do not believe I am in denial.  I even pray about my dreams before I sleep. Yet my mind seems busier at night than it is in the day, does that happen for others too?
      But I won’t give up. There must be some great dream moments to come, beautiful dreams that actually have beginnings, middles and ends. Dreams that I wish I could never wake up from. That could happen. And maybe I hold the key. Maybe the more I let go of in the day, the more wholeness and splendor I will gain in whatever dreams may come in the night. But if it doesn’t happen, I will accept it and continue to daydream my beautiful dreams that come to me while the sun is upon me and my mind is clear and open to the beauty of the day around me; and of living and breathing and creating art, and of course, soaking up the gorgeousness of God.  

Tonya Willman ©2010