Of course, I didn't realize it was a dream until I woke up. Which is usually the case. Sometimes though I clutch my pillow and try to fall back into it, but even if I manage to dip back down into that world the details are missing, only that moment, that scene still comes to mind. It becomes a more desperate affair, sinking anxiety and urgency color the world as a part of me knows it can slip away at any moment.
I'm dreaming more now. I'm not sure why. Have I always been dreaming, am I just remembering them more now? Often I can't remember, my mind forcing me to forget even if I desperately wish to. These forbidden stories not allowed to remain known to my conscious self. Sometimes all I know is that I have dreamt, remembering only how it made me feel the morning after. Sitting in the quite, reeling in the aftermath of the escapades my mind has gotten up to in the evening hours.
I swear my dreams have their own internal library; their own chronological events. For it seems dreams are the only place I can remember dreams. Last week while in the middle of what I can only remember as a tea party in a caravan with an odd assortment of ever-changing faces of family friends, classmates, and the woman I met at the grocery a few weeks back, I suddenly recalled that I'd been framed for murder as a child. Now neither the party nor the murder had ever taken place but the detailed dream of dealing with false accusations of murder in the first degree became a memory of my new van driving, tea drinking persona. Even my dream self seemed surprised at the memory. Not in its absurdity because most dreams seem to play out like community theater improv, 'yes and', but that I had remembered it at all was surprising.
My morning self had to mull over this realization alone while the rest of the house slept. I realized that this was not a new occurrence for sure I had recalled such detailed dreams like this before, but only in other dreams. Sometimes a dream resumed months later; my mind would pick up on a tale my hazelnut coffee, toasted bagel self wouldn't recognize for the life of me.
The hardest thing to do with a dream, other than remember it, is to explain it… especially when you can't remember it. At times I'm so desperate to relate these mental story gymnastics, these subconscious antics, to the first person who will listen, or who will tolerate my talking at them. Nodding with confused eyes and doubting smirk, they listen as I desperately try to make such an odd assortment of events characters and plot, or what little I can recall, matter as much as it did to me in my dream.
For dreams can make you feel things. Such an odd assortment of drives, and wants, and feelings. I feel robbed at times, to not be able to recall what made me feel such a way. To awake and know I had been a hero but to not recall what I had done or who I had saved. To enter awareness feeling like I had a mission, a job to do with people counting on me, and not being able to finish my destiny.
It felt like… You see it was… We were…
The feeling sits in my chest. My breath catches as the last thought leaves my head. Let me fall back, let me rejoin my foes, my friends, the people I have yet to meet.
The closest I can come to catching them, reclaiming them, is to grasp the pen, to pound the keys.
But still, my hands hover, the words stuck.
