"What Dreams May Come"

Everyone you ever know will abandon you.

Out of Office Reply

I’m sorry, the angst that you’re looking for is not here at the moment. It will be out for the remainder of the day. If your heart is urgent, please contact our mutual friend.

A good thing can derail you completely. For me, it’s always been love. Not that very heavy, philosophically speaking, duty bound, obligation wrapped, entrenched in existence, long term love. I mean the colloquial stuff. The stuff that we honestly shouldn’t call love, because it’s not, but we really want to anyways. It’s a combination of romance and a casual cat-and-mouse chase, sprinkled with that touch of light lust. The kind that doesn’t pine, but smiles.

It’s a game. A magnificent fantasy that lives in between the space of what we say, and what we don’t. A delightful, innocent yet guilty escape that we can all live in, just for a little while. A place where all of our worries and concerns, our truths and realities, can be put on a shelf and we can live a life where we’re really who we want to be.

It’s the really good stuff.

I’m addicted to it. I don’t care if it’s not real. When a pretty girl compliments me in just such a way that I can imagine they really do mean it, I’m transported to the top of the world.

The best do it with far more subtlety. A smile. A glance. A laugh. My favourite is a send-off. I know a friend who can do it with a thanks or a goodbye. Incredible grace. She knows the game.

I had the most extraordinary dream the other night. I know I’ve reported dreams before. And I know, one of the most boring thing to hear about is someone else’s dreams. But this was something else. This has got to be told. The very definition of a sweet dream. Nothing smutty, or slutty, or any of the usual nocturnal fantasies of male-ness. All our clothes stayed on. It was Romeo and Juliet without the bad ending.

Have you ever had one?

I will not bother you with the fantastic details. It is enough to say that I was visiting her, this woman of my dreams. Her dad was imposing. There was a challenge of egos. I won, but no one looked bad. We all laughed and spent time together. All of it, of course, distorted by the kaleidoscope of the dream world. Soon after our gallivanting, in a private moment, I admitted that I liked her. In retrospect it feels like the script was stolen from a high school special.

And then, in a moment of pure earnestness and honesty that I’m only capable of in dreams, I wrapped my fingers around hers and we held hands.

I woke up in that moment, in the warmest of ways.

It wasn’t that the dream had ended, so much as that it had become too blissfully real to be contained. If you’ve ever had a nightmare, that cumulated into an image that shook you awake, you’ll know the sort of thing I’m talking about. I didn’t know that it could happen the other way around, not with fear but with joy. Turns out, it can.

It certainly derailed me. None of the waking troubles of the world could touch me in the following hours. False as though it may have been, there had been a reality there that Hollywood and the best of lying lovers will never be able to imitate.

Whether it’s waking or sleeping: sweet dreams.

- Z