I don’t dream too often. Whenever I do, they are nightmares.
Not the lofty, “giant spiders that trying to devour you” kind of dreams. I wish they are ones that just makes me woken up swimming in sweat and call it a day. My dreams are persistent in what kind of message they try to delivers.
I’m going to give you a few examples.
There was this one dream. I was in a middle of something. I was in the middle of a terrorist attack of some sort. I was standing on the ground, looking up to the sky. A hole with burning fires of the high floor of the skyscraper. The exact location or the similarity of such even in real life is unknown to me. But the scenery… everything was black and white.
It was a black and white dream.
There were people running away from it. From the building, from the fire, from the chaos, from… everything. Everything but me.
The crowd moved toward me like a huge wave I knew where it’d land but still feel its presence everywhere at once instead of one direction. And parted away from where I stood. I feel like Moses standing in the middle of the pathway he tore in the middle of the ocean. But instead of giving me comfort, it just made me feel… numb.
The dream ended with when there was only one woman, who ran away from something. She ran toward me. A debris fell from the sky, fell onto her back while she was still running. Split her body in half. The upper flew into my arm as I tried to run toward her.
The upper half of the woman lied in my arms, screaming.
The upper half of the woman lied in my arms, screaming.
The upper half of the woman lied in my arms, screaming.
I can still hear her scream sometimes.
…
There was this one dream where there was nothing.
Nothing.
I fell from endless abyss of nothing downward, or upward. I couldn’t tell. I fell freely. Endlessly. Day was turning into night, night would turn into day. A gradient spanned in the far edge of my eyes as I fell.
I fell for centuries as if it was a second. Or was it a second that felt like a century?
I fell. And there was nothing around.
I fell.
…
I have to keep the rest for myself. Not because I’m too stingy to share something of little value such as a story or a dream. Is it because, please forgive me, they still represent what I’ve been through up until now.
I know that when I dream of a burning something in a black and white settings, and when I dream of myself standing in a burning setting that is black and white, it is because of my fear of hopelessness. No, not exactly a fear. Something I carry like a luggage.
I know that when I dream of someone died, someone being helpless, someone who needs to be saved. I know that my needs to help people were unanswered somewhere, somewhen, somehow. When it creeps back, it yawned into me like a moral justice system that sentence me to the jail cells of soul crimes.
Please do note, and please do understand, I don’t write these out as a way of me to virtue signal how much of a selfless hero and a white knight I am. I can assure you that I am NOT a good person, not even in thoughts.
I just know that I am punishing myself. Long after I made a deliberate effort in trying to move past… everything. I know why I dreamt such dreams. I know what they mean. I understand why I still dream such dreams. And even after all that acknowledgement and understanding, never once I could feel at peace.
Because I am so incompetent at being human, I punish myself even when I’m unconscious.
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