You know how when you’re having a dream you sometimes get angry, or frustrated, or delighted or calm…but you almost never get utterly baffled. A giant purple ostrich walks into your house, which you’ll later realize (upon waking) is not your house at all but is actually a bakery you peed at once, and instead of thinking, “When the fuck did I get an ostrich?” you think “I wonder if it wants me to scritch it on the head?” But you think it in symbols that aren’t real words because words don’t exist in these dreams, and then you have a sudden epiphany and you realize something brilliant and clever and life-altering and you wake up and jot it down on your arm so that you won’t forget it, and you fall back asleep feeling as content and satisfied and proud of yourself as you’ve felt in years because FINALLY you’ve made a small bit of sense of it all and put things in order. And then you wake up the next morning and lay in bed feeling happy that you figured out an important truth out and then you start to think about it and it seems a bit cloudy and you thank God you thought to write it all down. And you look at your arm that “enlightened you” wrote and it says “Cheese is the meaning of life. Because milk is the beginning of life and you need milk when you’re a baby and you need milk to make cheese and that’s how the world is made. BECAUSE OF CHEESE.”
And then you frown and collapse back into bed and realize that you’re an idiot and that your one moment of pure clarification and epiphany is just a jumbled bit of nonsense about the meaning of the world being cheese. Which is actually not a terrible epiphany, all things considered, because cheese really is brilliant, but it’s not quite the earth-shattering truth that made you understand the world and your place in it in your half-dream state.
It’s odd, isn’t it? That dreams are so confusing, but that we’re so seldom confused when we’re in them. It’s only when we’re awake that we realize how insane our dreams are. And when I’m awake, the emotion I feel most often is confusion. Is it that I use up all my confusion during the day and then at night I’ve exhausted it so much that houses-with-legs-on-them and universal-languages-made-of-cat-noises seem unquestionable and common? Or is it that dreams are where everything makes sense and that we’re just not able to appreciate them when we’re awake because we’re too drugged up by our consciousness to understand the massively complicated string-theory of cheese because we’re too full of brakes and fear and “no-you-may-not-have-another-cookie” and the number of days our inspection sticker has been expired?
I don’t know. I suspect I might know though if this was a dream.
Let’s pretend it is. Let’s pretend that it makes perfect sense and that for just a moment we understand life, and things are good and clear and we are so much less stupid than we feared we were.
It’s a nice dream.
I think I’ll keep it.