Our brains are extraordinary things — staggeringly complex, still largely mysterious, and doing half their most interesting work while we’re not even conscious enough to notice. The part that intrigues me most is what happens when we sleep. That whole other country the mind slips off to when the lights go down.
There are dreams, and then there are Dreams. They’re not all the same animal.
I wish I could remember every one I’ve ever had. I imagine it like a little hard drive tucked somewhere behind my left ear, with a save button I could press each time I drift off. Better yet, I wish I could hand my brain a script at bedtime — give it the opening scene and let it run from there. If I could do that, I know exactly what I’d choose: running. Just running, the way Forrest Gump did, across the open country, seeing things I’ve never seen, taking the long unhurried time to appreciate things I’ve always rushed past. The chances of me actually running anywhere for any real distance these days are slim to none, what with a heart that requires careful management and a body that’s gotten comfortable with stillness. So I’ll take the dream version and be grateful for it.
I’m working a schedule right now that has me doing twelve-hour night shifts for half the month, then trying to sleep like a normal human being the other half. It creates a kind of internal confusion that’s hard to describe — part zombie, part insomniac, occasionally something stranger and more interesting than either. On my days off I’m half-asleep by early evening. On the days before a shift I’ll lie down and try to rest a few hours before going in, and most of the time I don’t fully get there — just hover in that strange country between waking and sleep.
That’s where the best dream I’ve had in years found me.
I was listening to music — Enya, I believe — drifting in and out, not quite here and not quite gone. And I began to see the music. Every note had color and shape. The chords bloomed like sunbursts and moonlight, silver and gold moving in patterns behind my eyes. The vocals — angelic, layered, unhurried — flowed through my mind like a wide blue river running toward the sea. I want to be clear that I was not on anything. This was simply what my half-sleeping brain decided to do with a piece of beautiful music on an afternoon when I’d let my guard down just enough to let it happen.
I didn’t want to come back. I lay there as still as I could, afraid that shifting position or thinking too directly about it would break the spell. It did eventually, the way all good things do. I haven’t been able to find my way back to that particular place since. But I keep the music on when I lie down, just in case.
On rare occasions I dream of people who are no longer here.
You’d think those dreams would come more often. But for me they’re infrequent — precious partly because they’re scarce. I think maybe they come more as you age, as the circle of people you’ve loved gradually grows quieter. I dream of my grandmother now and then, and almost always she’s in the kitchen. I can smell the biscuits. I can see her moving around that kitchen with the easy authority of someone who has made that exact motion ten thousand times and never once had to think about it.
I never asked her to teach me how to make those biscuits. I always thought I’d have more time.
She lived to be a hundred years old, and when she reached that birthday I asked her what she’d do differently if she had it all to go over again. She thought about it and said simply: “Worry less — because worry never did change nothing.”
It still doesn’t, Grandma. It still doesn’t.
What a thing, to have a hundred years of living distilled down to six words, and to have them be exactly right.
I wish I could step into those dreams on purpose — knock on the door of that kitchen, sit down at that table, and say the things I always assumed I’d have time to say out loud. That’s the real ache of it. Not just missing the people who are gone, but knowing that some of the people still with us now will one day only be reachable this way — in the odd, infrequent grace of a dream. That thought has a way of making you want to say what needs saying while you still can.
I haven’t had any bad dreams lately. No nightmares, nothing even close. My ten-year-old granddaughter has them, though. When she spends the night, there are occasions when my wife and I surface from sleep to find her standing quietly beside the bed in the dark.
“I had a bad dream,” she says, already half-climbing in.
“It’ll be okay,” I tell her, and move over to make room.
And it will be. By morning she won’t remember what frightened her. Most dreams dissolve that way — slipping back through whatever door they came from before the day can get a good look at them. The bad ones especially seem to know they’re not welcome in the daylight.
It’s two in the morning as I write this, six hours still to go on my shift, and reality is biting harder than I’d like to admit. But when I get home and the shift is done and I put on the music and lie down, maybe — just maybe — my brain will remember where it left off the other afternoon and find its way back to that river of blue sound and silver light.
I sure hope so.
Writing for Sanity's Sake 