dream life

In my dream, I am on a quest. I am always on a quest, filled with puzzling clues and ever-increasing tasks. I need to make it to the basement, but my car crashes into a convenience store and I need to put all the hostess cupcakes and boxes of ritz crackers back on the shelves before I can move on. I’m looking for clues scrawled on bits of lined paper rolled up and hidden in a grandfather clock with the president’s son, but the mystery stays tightly wound while I try to stay asleep. The worst is the dream where I am soaring down train tunnels, not part of the train but moving at the speed and rhythm of one and I end up in a chocolate store where you kiss me on the hand and I wake up before I can ask you why you are there.

For a fitful restless sleeper, it is agonizing to try to stay in my dreams. I hear a faucet running somewhere and my eyes shoot open. I look at the clock, 3:22 a.m. and try to go back into my dream because they need me there! I need to make it to the bottom of the slide, I need to go to the store for a jar of salted macadamias, I need to teach the class how to talk about farm animals in German. I am a better person in my dreams. I know how to say the right things and make sweet-faced boys want to hold my hand as we walk through a tent of green and yellow lights. The self of my dreams has goals and methods and a purpose and the morning sun in my eyes is always a dreary reminder that my waking self is weak and fickle.

Is it any wonder that I am eager to sleep at night? I can’t stand the uppers my friends try to share with me because they trap me in my consciousness where my fingers are fidgety and my mind has plenty of time to think about where things have gone wrong. My brain needs a rest, I tell them. I put on pajamas, an old camp shirt and a pair of shorts and mask my worries in the pages of a familiar book, maybe The Phantom Tollbooth, where everything is a directionless quest in a colorful baffling world. I read until my head is heavy and I think about a place I want to be, a place that only exists in watercolor and ink lines, and I slip into sleep again.