Lucid Dream

What defines reality? Is there a boundary between reality and fantasy? If life was nothing but a dream, an infinite cycle of re-awakening into another dream, would it too be fantasy? These questions tear at my heart as I lie here half way between sheets. The ceiling’s blank contours leave me without answers, but still, I look further. Who can tell me that my reality is fantasy if it feels more real than I ever did? I know it isn’t real, but these visions make me think otherwise. I’d call myself crazy if I hadn’t experienced them myself, but here I am. My mind battles with my thoughts for control, but I can’t come to any type of conclusion. I toss and turn from side to side, trying to find a comfortable position between these divided sheets. But I can’t rest, no, not in this condition. I can only dream. Dream of the only reality I’ve ever known. Dream of the only life I’ve ever lived; the only euphoria this young heart has ever felt.

Nobody quite understands me, but then again, neither do I. The reflection in my bathroom mirror has no semblance of the Jack that I once knew; the me of one year ago. That was before it all started. Before I started having these “dreams”. I wasn’t really heading anywhere, you know, I was just some happy-go-lucky kid trying to get by. But one day it all changed. It all started at the very end of my day, or should I say at the beginning of the next? I can’t remember exactly what was going through my mind before I had the dream, but I do remember lying awake in bed, staring at the ceiling as I always do after waking from it. There is no way that I can fully explain this phenomenon to you in words and words alone, but I feel that I must try. My hope is that someday, someone will understand that what I feel is not a false hope, but a reality, a reality that is not just a dream, but a dream that has become reality: a tangible, living, definite truth.

Every night, I’d close my eyes and open them to find myself in a world of flamboyant color. Even though I’ve had this dream many times before, I can’t help but drop my jaw every time I set my eyes upon the landscape. Rolling meadows of green sway gently in the breeze. In the distance lies a mountain peeking into the clouds, no summit in sight. Trees spring up along the mountain side like rain drops on a window. This sea of green flows gently into a sea of blue, waving tenderly against the ocean shore. Between all of this beauty lies the heart of my dream, a maple log cabin placed carefully between a coupling of trees. An inviting smell emanates from its chimney and every time, I head straight for it. I walk slowly through the sand, taking slow, heavy steps as my nose carries me toward the scent. I stop at the door and knock twice. The door creaks open slightly and I push it open and every time, I find the same girl sitting in the corner, crying. The light from the sun shines through the open door way and reveals her to me. Her mellifluous brown hair droops carefully over her tear-stained face. With her head in lap, she shudders uncontrollably, from what, I don’t know. I walk slowly toward her and the sound of crying becomes more distinct with every step. I then stop and wonder what the problem could possibly be. I look all around, but nothing seems amiss. I then stoop to my knees as I extend my hand forward and ask, “Why are you crying?”. The crying then stops, and through the beads of hair appears the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen. My scrupulous eyes can’t find a single flaw in the masterpiece before me. I can’t help but feel tender as it all plays out in front of me. Her tears still cling to her cheeks and eyes as she wipes them off gently with her palms. Upon first eye contact I blush, or at least I think I blush, and then we both look away. I catch her turning bright red out of the corner of my eye as she looks to the left and I to the right. After a moment’s pause, I call out, “You look kind of sad. Are you all right?” while scratching the back of my neck. I turn my head back to find a smile drift slowly across her face. I smile back and from there begins our journey. As though nothing had upset her in the first place, we soon began walking and playing as though we were best of friends. Whenever she would laugh, I would laugh. Whenever I’d smile, she’d smile. Never did I feel such happiness in my life. Never before did it feel so great to be alive. But as all dreams must end, mine does too. I wake up in my bed and the first thing I see upon awaking is the ceiling. The first time I had this dream, I woke up in excitement hoping that I could return to my reality, but in actuality it only existed in my head. I was overwhelmed with a feeling of false hope. The false hope felt whenever you awaken from a dream that seemed so perfect, only to find yourself in some stranger’s body that is unmistakably your own. So there I lie, staring at the ceiling, wondering over and over again whether or not it was strange that I started to consider this new found feeling as “love”.

After the first few times of having this dream, I realized that I had never caught this young girl’s name. I’d simply referred to her as “her” or “she” in my thoughts. I’d always try to remember to ask, but because I’d never catch on that it was a dream, I never remembered. But still, I would have this dream each and every night, and every time it would be an entirely new adventure. Whether it was what we talked about or what we did, it was always different. We once scaled that mountain lingering in the distance and slid down its spine, down into the ocean. We once sat on the beach and laughed at the moon, laughing because the moon had forgotten to sleep. For once in my teenage life, I was extremely happy to get to bed early on a school night. People found it odd that I’d take naps instead of play outside during recess, but I was willing to do anything to have that same dream again. That’s why they started calling me Rip Van Winkle, but it didn’t really bother me. My parents were enthralled to hear that I had decided to go to bed early for school every day, but my true motive was quite different. Even now, I feel weird just writing about this. I mean, it sounds ridiculous, but I had somehow fallen in love with my mind’s own creation. I seriously couldn’t believe that my mind was able to create such a lucid and perfect world, not to mention girl, but I soon began to accept it as the dreams came back over and over again. Something about “her” just didn’t seem possible for my underdeveloped brain to have conjured her. There had to be something more behind the frequency and lucidness of these dreams that I just didn’t understand. And I was right.

It had been about five months into these dreams that I first started to catch subtle clues about their origins. For one, “she” was somehow able to learn things progressively as my dreams went on. She would listen to my stories and she would tell me hers. She told me things that I had never heard before, which I assumed to be false figments of my imagination. Little did I know then, but all of them were actually true. In class, I’d bring up her findings as my own and my teacher would often commend me for knowing something she hadn’t even taught yet. Now this freaked me out. I may have been a little crazy about sleep before, but this time it became serious. I made it my life to figure out the meaning behind these dreams, and I had to do so while making sure no one would ever find out about them. For all I knew, anyone could prevent me from having these dreams and with my crazy story I’d probably be sent to some insane asylum somewhere in Nebraska. So every night, I’d try and try to remember to ask the girl for her name, but quite a few times I would only remember when it was too late. In one dream, I remember her asking for my name, at which point I woke up. But this still shocked me. Why would she suddenly ask for my name? I obviously know my own name so chances were that it would slip into my dream by accident. I mean, she had plenty of chances before as did I. But even so, we never made it a priority to find out. But one night, we had a break through. I finally remembered to ask her for her name. She said her name was “Tanya”, after which she smiled and asked me for my name which I graciously gave her. We both smiled and that was when I woke up. Again the ceiling stood there above my head, but this time I felt as though the ceiling was staring down at me and not the other way around. I had made some progress. I was happy.

It only took a little bit more thought after that point to discover the meaning of these perpetual dreams. It finally hit me after I put the final piece of the puzzle together: she accurately aged and matured in the same way that I did, and was even able to help me remember things that I had most certainly forgot. When the answer finally hit me, I couldn’t have been any more surprised than I was relieved. She was a real person. Yes, as insane of a conclusion that it was, it was the conclusion I had come to. I had a feeling that someone else, somewhere else in the world, was having the same dream as me, but acting on the other end of it. It made perfect sense to me and I wanted to believe it for my own sanity’s sake. And so, I thought hard on how I could possibly make contact with Tanya outside the realm of dreams.

It took a few tries, but I finally got to making contact with her about “reality”. When I finally made contact, she seemed very confused. It felt as though my mind was about to purge me from this dream, but instead, she replied, “I knew I wasn’t crazy for liking you”. And with that, I woke up. You had never seen a boy so excited at 6 A.M. than when I did a little victory dance in my pajamas that morning. I went to school in a state of ecstasy, bouncing off the walls and yelling as though I were king of the apes. My classmates’ explanation for my behavior was that I had been slowly hibernating and now I had finally “woken up”. Before the final bell, I made sure to write down in big bold letters “TONIGHT’S THE NIGHT!” in my homework pad. I don’t even read my homework pad, but if it killed some time between now and then, then of course I’d write it. What had seemed like an eternity, finally ended with me in bed around 8:00. I wasn’t going to miss this opportunity for my life, but that opportunity never came.

The dreams that forced themselves so easily into my head suddenly didn’t come at all. I woke up and tried to recall my life changing dream, but I couldn’t recall having any dream at all. For weeks I tried different routines to get my dreams to come back. I tried going to bed at exactly 8:30, but that did nothing. I tried imagining the dream as I went to sleep, but still nothing. I tried everything I could think of to fix what might have changed in my life to make them stop, but all to no avail. I was so close, but only when I found the truth did it decide to run away. A game of hide and seek that turned into something more than mere child’s play.

Oh yes, I did dream after that, but those dreams were clearly mine and mine alone. They weren’t as frequent, but they came gradually. They weren’t as vibrant, but they sufficed. They weren’t as meaningful, but they came and went all the same. And every time I woke up, I found myself rescanning the ceiling for some meaning in this dirty trick that God had played on me. I had to wait eight more years for God’s answer, a time during which I had lost all hope in life through love.

By this point I had forced Tanya out of my head and was living my life on auto-pilot. I graduated college and started my job in Boston as an architect. I had been living there for almost a year when it happened. I was walking in the city and into a crowded thoroughfare when I felt a twinge in the back of my head. It wasn’t of pain, but a tugging sensation inside my head. My head started screaming out that Tanya was near. Flashes of my dreams appeared in my mind as I looked all around for any sign of her. Time passed slowly as I stood there against the rhythm of the people walking in both directions. I thought I had caught a glimpse of her, but the crowd of people was too dense to push through. But then again, my mind had tricked me before, so why not now? There was no way that it could have been her. It reopened the wounds that had partially healed from eight years ago, certain to leave scars. I cried as I walked away from the street, pushing through the crowd, making a mental note not to return to this place any time soon. People seemed to move out of the way as I straggled down the sidewalk. I somehow managed to plop myself onto my bed, but the luxury of getting there never seemed to come. I lay there between sheets as I did many times before. The sheets were divided once more and no comfortable position could be found. I couldn’t sleep, but when time finally permitted me, I had the dream once more.

This time, the sun did not sit so high in sky as it was now perched behind the horizon, fading into the distance. The maple cabin was still there, but the chimney smoke and its distinct smell were both gone. The trees were covered in Autumn and beneath them lay their dead leaves. I looked around at what should have been familiar places, but instead found little comfort in them. Something told me that this place had died long ago. I quickly snapped out of my gaga-eyed stare of the unfamiliar to realize that I had been given back the opportunity lost eight years ago. I ran to the cabin and swung the door open. Inside I found no one. I then ran around the beach hollering for Tanya, but she wasn’t there. I ran to the base of the mountain and yelled with all the breath in my body. No response. After a thorough search that seemed to take hours, I plopped myself down in the sand while facing the ocean and put myself into the same position that I would always find Tanya in at the beginning of my dreams. I cried tears of sorrow while my lips quivered violently in my lap. It would only be a matter of time before I’d awaken from this dream, this dream that had once made me feel so high, but had now turned into a nightmare. But then, just as I had given up, a figure appeared in front of me with an outstretched hand that whispered, “Why are you crying?”. I peered outward through the tops of my arms as my quivering lips stop their trembling. A smiling woman, the most beautiful girl I once knew, was standing in front of me as the most beautiful woman I had ever seen. I smiled back as she called my name and embraced me with outstretched arms. This place of despair had suddenly become much more familiar. This was the place that I had once called my home.

The sun was almost out of view, and we knew that our time was almost up. We learned everything necessary to make contact outside of this dream world. For the first time in eight years, we were living our dream again. We sat together, shoulder to shoulder as we watched the sun set into the sea. Every inch the sun appeared to move, the more we seemed to fade away. We looked at each other intently in the final moments that we had together. It felt as though one breath out of cadence was all it would take to ruin this moment. We moved in and as our lips locked, we closed our eyes. I reopened them to find for once that I was not staring at an undefinable ceiling, but instead staring into one of my pillows. I impulsively whispered “Tanya” to no one as I lie there in my bed. I tried hard to remember the specifics of that night’s conversation, but they were all a blur to me. Although the facts are lost, I have finally found the answer I’ve been looking for. I know that someday our paths will cross again, whether it be through another dream or through our inevitable meeting in the near future. I can only pray that she has not forgotten the information I gave her that I so unknowingly lost from her, our only chance to shorten the time that we must wait until we meet again.

The only question that remains is: “Why did I have these dreams?” and the only answer is: “I don’t know”. Was there a scientific reason? No, science could never have made this possible. “Was there some curse or magic that made them happen?” Maybe, but then again, some people say love is magic. I don’t know why it happened to me, and I definitely don’t know how it happened to me, but in the end, it ended up being the only thing I can swear with all I am to be one hundred percent true. So here I am, finishing this entry, ending my journey, confirming for once and for all: I’m not crazy. I’m in love.