Last night I stayed up too late. This morning I woke up before the alarm (it’s daylight savings time; it always confuses me). I shut off the alarm and I went back to sleep.
I didn’t want to wake up.
It wasn’t because I was depressed or dreading going to work this morning. Neither. You’d think, with the state of things lately, it would be that. That’s what I would have thought. But, I was having a dream. And I didn’t want to wake up.
That dream is sticking with me today, hours later; I can’t shake it. And I don’t care.
My dreams are always unique. Generally they don’t have sound. Periodically they don’t make sense. Often they could never come true. Once in a blue moon I have a dream and I wake up still experiencing the emotions (and even physical sensations) experienced in the dream. Sometimes they stay for several hours, and there are moments within those hours that I sincerely can’t tell what has been dreamed and what is real. When this is a bad dream, this is awful and it can take me a whole day to recover from the drama–I wake up fearing that the dream is real–it’s always a terrible experience. When this is a good dream, I relish it, as today. I remember these dreams. For years afterward. I still remember some of the first dreams I had like this when I was a kid. I remember almost all of them. Funny I don’t always remember the details, but I remember the emotions, I remember burrowing back into my warm bed and not wanting to wake yet because the feelings were so real, decadent.
Emotions are such a funny thing because you can’t truly share them with anyone else. Other people feel, but not like I do. What was unique about this morning’s dream was that I could actually tangibly experience the emotions of certain others in the dream, and mine simultaneously. In reality I can’t really let anyone in that far, no matter how intimate we are. Some people wear their emotions on their sleeve–but that only makes us aware, it doesn’t make us feel identically. Sometimes when I have these dreams I forget that…because I’m remembering how rich emotions are, and how much I have hidden them, from myself, from others.
In many ways, especially in this context, I am only now waking up. This season of my life is glorious and frightening and wonderful and awful because when you wake up you have no idea what’s coming the rest of the day, the rest of your life. Things can turn on a dime–life can make you celebrate or make everything come crashing down in a moment. There’s something about this that is so exhilarating and so frightening. Even so, I’m glad I am waking up to truly experience it. On mornings and days like this I feel like I can open myself up to things that I have been hiding from or fearing. Life doesn’t seem so foreboding or full of wonderment in a bad way. It feels exhilarating and refreshing and full of expectation, in a good way. Emotions are weird and wonderful, and I know that they can trick me. Funny I don’t mind knowing that I’m being tricked on days like this.
