A Great Dream and Regrets
At night I usually manage to time things so that an instant after I switch off the bedside lamp, I fall asleep. But last night I tossed and turned for so long that I almost decided to get back up, put on my clothes again, and resume my usual nocturnal wanderings through the house. But I fought that notion, and I finally did fall asleep, and at some point I had that most unusual of experiences, an endlessly pleasant and reasonable dream.
I was somewhere at Howard U. in D.C., my alma mater, and so was this girl, this woman, with whom, in real life long ago, back in the late 1950's, I had spent large amounts of time in the library, exchanging countless looks across the huge gap of more my shyness than hers, without ever speaking to her. But now I was much older, and she, too, was older but not nearly as much. She looked different. Her face was thinner and more marked with experience and knowing, but she was still the same woman, Sara (Something).
She had been with some other people but they soon drifted elsewhere, and that left just her, and, miracle of miracles, she was looking as intently in my direction as I was in hers. I was doing something with some string, and i saw that she was mimicking my every move. I kept glancing behind me to see if she was really looking at someone else, but unlike the way our earlier real life series of encounters had eventually turned out, this time no one else was there.
So then the really remarkable thing happened. Without the use of our legs we moved toward each other, till she was just a few feet away and we smiled at each other. And then we had a long and very nice talk, in ways that, unlike in the usual dream, actually made sense. She told me that she was now a first year grad student, in business. I recounted to her that once I had had a play performed at Howard. (My subconsciousness must've thought that she knew that perfectly well, because, with the guy who had finally claimed her heart, she had attended a second play in which I had played a non-speaking jury member). I worried some that I had become much too old to interest her, but that didn't seem to make any difference, and instead she invited me to share a meal that she had fixed.
My understanding is that the function of dreams is not well understood, though one theory is that they serve as a dumping ground for our anxieties. Assuming that I am not a complete oddball and that sometimes other people have experiences similar to mine, let me say then that, besides the obvious upside there's also a smaller but inevitable downside to having a dream as wonderful as this.
With the great majority of our dreams, we are just as relieved as we can be to awake and find ourselves in the good old real world. We have made another unbelievable escape from something totally bad and ridiculous. But when you have a terrific dream like this, you wake up instead with intense regret, and you wish that that wonderful person, this woman, was real so that ever afterward you could look at her and talk with her whenever you pleased. But alas, as in all these dreams, which might occur only once every 10 years or so, you know that this incredible being will never ever reappear, even in another dream. And that regret lasts longer than it takes that dream, too, eventually to fade from memory.
I was somewhere at Howard U. in D.C., my alma mater, and so was this girl, this woman, with whom, in real life long ago, back in the late 1950's, I had spent large amounts of time in the library, exchanging countless looks across the huge gap of more my shyness than hers, without ever speaking to her. But now I was much older, and she, too, was older but not nearly as much. She looked different. Her face was thinner and more marked with experience and knowing, but she was still the same woman, Sara (Something).
She had been with some other people but they soon drifted elsewhere, and that left just her, and, miracle of miracles, she was looking as intently in my direction as I was in hers. I was doing something with some string, and i saw that she was mimicking my every move. I kept glancing behind me to see if she was really looking at someone else, but unlike the way our earlier real life series of encounters had eventually turned out, this time no one else was there.
So then the really remarkable thing happened. Without the use of our legs we moved toward each other, till she was just a few feet away and we smiled at each other. And then we had a long and very nice talk, in ways that, unlike in the usual dream, actually made sense. She told me that she was now a first year grad student, in business. I recounted to her that once I had had a play performed at Howard. (My subconsciousness must've thought that she knew that perfectly well, because, with the guy who had finally claimed her heart, she had attended a second play in which I had played a non-speaking jury member). I worried some that I had become much too old to interest her, but that didn't seem to make any difference, and instead she invited me to share a meal that she had fixed.
My understanding is that the function of dreams is not well understood, though one theory is that they serve as a dumping ground for our anxieties. Assuming that I am not a complete oddball and that sometimes other people have experiences similar to mine, let me say then that, besides the obvious upside there's also a smaller but inevitable downside to having a dream as wonderful as this.
With the great majority of our dreams, we are just as relieved as we can be to awake and find ourselves in the good old real world. We have made another unbelievable escape from something totally bad and ridiculous. But when you have a terrific dream like this, you wake up instead with intense regret, and you wish that that wonderful person, this woman, was real so that ever afterward you could look at her and talk with her whenever you pleased. But alas, as in all these dreams, which might occur only once every 10 years or so, you know that this incredible being will never ever reappear, even in another dream. And that regret lasts longer than it takes that dream, too, eventually to fade from memory.
posted by Carl (aka Sofarsogoo) | 7:28 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home