April 22, 2009
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dreams and wishes
Imagine if you never had normal dreams.
Suppose you dreamed all the time, but none of your dreams were just good or just bad. They were always the most extreme dreams you could imagine having.
Like imagine your good dreams were absolute perfection. They were beautiful: colors so bright and vibrant they make everything you’ve ever seen in the real world look like black and white. Smells, sounds, feelings, equally exquisite. Touching moments more endearing than any scene from a classic movie. Soaring moments of joy, passion, and moments of total contentment and satisfaction. And here was humor too! Delightful entertaining humor that left you rolling in your mind with uncontrollable fits of laughter. And music! Classical music only like nothing any mortal composer could ever design. Far more intricate and gorgeously beautiful and invoking the deepest emotions. Your dreams that were just better in every way than anything you experienced or could even HOPE to experience in real life. And yet the dreams left you wanting and wishing for that perfection with all your heart.
But at the same time you had bad dreams that were as horrible as the good dreams were beautiful. They were torturous nightmares of the most horrifying nature. Again perfect visuals, smells, sounds, feelings. More real than being there. More terrifying, painful, tormenting than anything you’ve ever experienced in waking life. It was all the darkest possibilities, the cruelest outcomes. You saw in your dreams a future devoid of hope, filled with doubt, longing, suffering, and despair. In your dreams you saw Death in the starkest terms possible, again and again and again.
And imagine then that 90% of these dreams, good and bad, centered around you. They were about your future. You saw yourself in your perfect future and you saw yourself in the darkest possible future imaginable, the kind that left you weeping and shaking when you awoke every single time.
Imagine you dreamed like this. That you had done so all your life, ever since you were a little kid and you were sickly and forced to be in bed all the time alone with your own mind and your torturous and wonderful dreams.
How would this change your outlook on life?
Would you feel blessed to have such wonderful dreams. Would you appreciate the good in life in comparison to the bad of your nightmares?
Or would you, far more likely, be left a mess. Ever would you be terrified of the darkness breaching from your dream reality into the present. Maybe those nightmares are my inevitable future, you might think. What if I can’t escape them?
And at the same time, the good dreams, would poison the good you experience. Every good experience would seem not as good, not as perfect as those that you dreamed of. Every happy moment, would be tinged with a sense of inevitable end. Like a dream, you’d have a sense ever present that this good can’t last. It’ll be over before you know it and the nightmares will return full of force and cruelty.
Would you be left with a sense of always striving to make your reality match a dream world? Would you be constantly running away from a nightmare reality that always seemed to be right at your heels threatening to devour you?
How would you escape this feeling? How would you learn to appreciate the good things that happen to you here and now, to see them as good and wonderful in their own right and not reflections of a dream that may never be real? Would there be anyone who could help you do that? Or would you ever be left trying to grapple with the fact that your wishes will never come to pass but you can’t help yourself from wishing for them anyway.
I don’t have dreams like this. It’s just a hypothetical. But I think if I did I would cope by writing stories to try and capture the vivacity of my dreams. And once they were locked in paper I would try and forget them and see the present for what it is. Imperfect, true, but beautiful in its own right. In many ways more beautiful because it isn’t perfectly good or perfectly bad but filled with flawed imperfect people doing an amazing job of trying their best to be the best that they can be. And I’d do my best to never believe that the darkness of my nightmares is coming. And if it does, I’d want to have as much joy as possible before that day comes to pass.
And heck one day my stories might turn into best selling novels and then at least I’ll have my riches to console me.
Comments (3)
you got a great imagination kellen.
it is better to not know sometimes, the measurement to compare to reality in this world. If one never dreams of such beauty or horrid things, then one would not know. I have had dreams in which I and a lover run through the fields of flowers like those Indian movies, and when i wake up, bammmnn this side of consciousness hits. I like to think that the dream was real, and maybe my perception of this consciousness is fooling me thinking that the dream’s reality wasn’t real. Yeah, maybe I did run through that field of flowers and I was happy in that timeline of reality. And perhaps this is a dream. I would like to think differently from what we have been told which conciousness is true or not. Still, comparing the two realities, that one was much more pleasant. hence the reminenscense.
What you think?
@duckling8912 - you know when i was a little kid my best theory was that every dream we had was a vision of another very real world. Like I thought our minds were all big antennas picking up stories from other consciousnesses across the depth and time and space of the universe. But we’re not very good receivers by and large, and some of us get better or worse signals than others. Writers I thought were just taking the dreams they picked up and filling the gaps in the transmission with their own imagination. And that’s where all our books and stories come from.
But likewise also I imagined that our own lives were being transmitted through space and time to other people on other worlds who were writing stories about US and our lives and deriving entertainment from our experiences.
So which reality is more real? Neither by this theory. Our dreams are just imperfect visions of something just as real as us. People and things that actually DO exist. And so likewise are our movies, and books and other stories. So no wonder when we meet a character we love in a story we think of them as a real person and care about them just as much as we do people we know in the real world. Because they ARE real, somewhere and in some way and maybe after you die you’ll get to meet them
I used to have extreme dreams during my freshmen year in college. I was a mess during then. You’re dead on in regards to the good experiences never being quite as good in comparison. In regards to the nightmares,writing it down didn’t help much, it just made me relive the memory of the nightmares. They randomly stopped near the end of the second semester.