When I wake up in the morning, I always have to adjust – adjust to the light, adjust to having my eyes open, adjust to realizing that the dreams I was just so intently living were just that: dreams. What do you say when your brain whisks you away to an alternate universe? When you slip into the abyss of a dream state ran by the governance of your subconscious? When you travel deep down this rabbit hole but there’s no true destination written on your boarding pass yet you know how you’re getting there because you’re in the midst of traversing there while in dreamland? What do you say when you finally arrive at this mystery destination in the abyssal subconscious and you feel appalled yet also relieved?
I tell myself that my dreams are just an alternate reality – a parallel universe that I merely get to spend a few minutes playing pretend in (a few days or weeks, perhaps even months in dreamland). But of course, that’s wishful thinking. My fantasies, fears, regrets, and most inner yearnings manifest themselves in dreamland only because they aren’t actualized in the real realm. It’s a peculiar thing to sit and pay attention to how our brains – our souls – will do this to us; teasing us with ideas of what could be, whether realistic or not. I always think to myself, “How dare I betray myself like that! Teasing and taunting myself with these dreams that remind me of the past, worry me about the future, and confuse me about the present!” And that’s why my dreams often leave me waking up in a fluster of confusion; trying to adjust my eyes while I’m deciphering what just occurred in the world I just returned from…
Often times, dreams elude to an element of the real life. The neural network within our cranium wouldn’t just conjure up something without some sort of source of inspiration – be it an event that occurred in real life, or a feeling that was elicited when we saw a beautiful piece of art, heard the melody of tune we came to know and love, or experienced something devastating. Perhaps the inspiration was a person we knew once in life, or even a stranger we saw at the train station or airport. Regardless, there is always a source, for the list of inspiration is infinite. And based off the source of inspiration, our brain will try to play out various stories that manifest into dreamland. When the inspiration is desire, these dreams are normally a pleasure to witness and endure. But when the inspiration is loss, it feels like torture. My subconscious leaves its arms stretched out, dangling the memories in front of my face as it uses it to conspire in torturing me with the what-could’ve-beens. It feels like torture because torture involves pain being inflicted upon someone against their will – but what nobody ever tells you is that we ourselves are most often tortured by our own psyche.
But no matter how often I experience this self-inflicted torture, I complain while stunned in a daze of confusion and curiosity. I struggle to find the words to iterate what just happened and why I feel tortured. How can I be so cruel to myself? Why would I betray myself and find these ways to tug on and play with my heart, ripping it slowly at the very seams I stitched up myself after it was ripped into nothing but pieces of itself? But that’s exactly it… it feels like torture but it’s not. It’s a chance to learn more about and fix myself again – another chance to stitch myself up properly. If I had done it right the first time, then the seams wouldn’t so easily fall apart. And that’s exactly what dreams are – they aren’t torture, but a cry for help, an homage to what I’ve lost; they’re a declaration of desire. Dreams are a teaser of all the possibilities that could be realized if I find a way to achieve and settle with these feelings of loss and desire. I just wish that my dreams would show me a realistic means for getting to my destination.
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Another Public Diary 