Due to pregnancy and breastfeeding and possibly sleep deprivation, I've not remembered any of my dreams for over four years. Last night I woke at 3am, like I always used to, from the most vivid dream I've had for years and I was blown away by the reality of it, the vividness of the colours, the sensation of touch and smell, the realness of the conversations and the intensity of the emotions. It felt so real, that I stayed awake for about an hour processing what had happened in the dream and what it meant to me, as if it had been real. It was a good experience that taught me a lot.
We get used to dreams, as adults, but feeling like this was my first real dream ever, I can now understand why children often find even the most ordinary dreams so frightening or confusing. How do you explain this concept to a toddler, how do you tell them it's not real, when it feels so very like reality?
It reminded me of something I wrote in 1997, over 20 years ago, when my dreams used to scare me.
Dreaming of reality
The illusion of reality scares me. What if what I see is not really there? What if all I see is just part of a
dream? What if I am just part of a
dream?
To be thinking this, I must be real. To have fear of nothing, I must be more than
nothing.
To realise that I am more than nothing, I must exist
in a world that also exists.
I live in what I see; I can touch it and smell
it. I have lived for twenty years in
this world, and it has remained constant throughout.
But what if those twenty years are just an
illusion? What if I haven’t really lived
in a world that was constant? What if
that was a dream too?
Does it matter?
If my memories are a dream, it was a nice dream. If all my experiences were part of a dream,
that dream taught me a lot.
Life is not about knowing what is real, or what to
believe in, or what I am.
It is accepting that things just are the way they
are and realising that I am no less real than that acceptance of my
environment.
I am who I am.
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Lovely to see your thoughts.