I always have dreams. Some people retort: "But of course! Humans dream every night." Yeah, well, I dream more. My subconscious talks more to me at night than I talk to others during the day. My dreams are vivid and they vary from frighteningly realistic to absurdly implausible. No matter the subject, no matter the context, my dreams never cease to scare me.
What's scary about something that isn't real? Everything. Something that isn't real can be anything it wants to be; there are no laws of gravity to follow, no rules of conduct to adhere to. Something that isn't real can plant itself in your brain and once it's there, there's no guarantee your thoughts are safe. You think and you think and all of a sudden something that wasn't there now exists. My dreams are scary because I make them real.
You know how dreams are created, right? They don't come from somewhere up above and they aren't implanted by conniving sandman terrorists. Dreams come from inside your mind - the inner core, the center of your earth. Things you can't think about and won't think about during the day always creep up around 2 a.m. They swirl around your various lobes and cortexes and other brain things, and then they spill out of your ears and eyes and nose and mouth and surround you in the most suffocating sort of thought cloud.
Most people, most sane people, forget their dreams soon after they wake up. They shake off sheets and blankets and they shake away the false fears and unrealized joys of their nighttime selves. They made their dreams but they did not make them real. I am not a sane person. I'm a thinker. I'm that sculpture with my hand resting on my palm. As stuck as he is in his marble mold, so am I stuck in my dreams.
I often dream about fighting my sister. I've psychoanalyzed the reasons behind this and I think the anger is founded in the aftermath of a fight about a boy that I lost in seventh grade. I'll wake up from this dream and I can't help it, I really can't, when I'm rude to her all day. Angry-dream-Connelly is so invested in the fight that real-world-Connelly is convinced it's real too.
I would not devote a rambling column to the topic of my dreams unless I believed I could fix them. Every morning I attempt to talk myself out of the lingering thoughts and feelings floating in and around my head. I thought that by writing about the ennui, I could talk myself out of the absurd belief that something intangible could haunt me for days.
And yet I started this column before I went to sleep and now I'm finishing it in the morning while I'm still swathed in sheets and blankets. I had an awful dream last night and I'm sad right now. I'm forced to consider that there is something scarier than making my dreams real. I'm inclined to conjecture that perhaps, just maybe, those little things my subconscious tells me while my eyes are closed and the resulting day-long affected emotions are important.
Perhaps instead of trying to ignore my inexplicable dream feelings, I should explore them. I've always loved sleeping and I've always hated waking up. If I embrace my dreams, if I suck it up and replace fear with curiosity, will I get to the root of the murky thoughts in my brain?
The thought of confronting my sister and spending the time to "get over" our deep-seated competitiveness is frightening. The thought of teaching myself how to let go of jealousy and start being nicer to my boyfriend is scary, too - the latter part is a joke, dear. I fight and I cry and I throw things in my dreams because real things in my real life are not whole and complete and balanced. I can't decide if I'd rather be moody all day or be brave for many days and start fixing the broken pieces of my life that my subconscious sees all too clearly.
Dreams really do come true. The more I push away what scares me, the further I'm pulled into a hole from which I can't climb out. Freud would be proud; I place more importance on dreams than I do on any other thought processes I have. Now I need to do something with them. If my dream mother becomes fatally ill, perhaps I should call her and tell her that I'm sorry I spent my book money on drinks. If my dream roommates die in a fiery crash, perhaps I should admit to them that I need to be better about cleaning my dishes.
I always have dreams. I don't always know what to do with them. I hope I figure it out quickly, before dream-Connelly escapes and makes real-Connelly start wreaking havoc on the world.
Connelly's column runs weekly Thursday. She can be reached at c.hardaway@cavaleridaily.com.
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