I Hate My Dreams

I Hate My dreams: oh, who can deliver us from the dreamtime?

One night I found myself in a dream. I was down town: just walking, not lost or anything, but just reviewing the shine of the city, squinting up into the builded sky, and listening to all the shafted channel-noise that reverberated upward from the motorcades as they revved away from each traffic light. Later, I met a buddy of mine from my high school days, and after languaging with him forever about all the heres and yonders of the newer city with its problem-changes, it began to get late. Out of his kindness, he loaned me a couple of dollars so that I wouldn’t have to walk the night-streets back to my home. I could see clearly the green of the linen in the two folded five-dollar bills that he placed into my hands, and I distinctly remember using almost all of it to catch three up-buses back out of the city.

In the course of time, several weeks later probably, I met him in my dream again and right away he reminded me of the money. As I reached down into my cargo pocket for my wallet, I asked him how much I owed him, because for some reason I just wasn’t able to recall that from the other dream. He began whispering, looking around at the walkers-by, and then back at me, leaning close like he did back in school when he was revealing something about his then girlfriend or something private or other: you remember, he said…I gave you…. This behavior mystified me greatly, but before I could inquire further he immediately moved on up-street, talk-drifting me toward some place he wanted to show me. So we walked back and around, me following him, wallet in hand repeatedly asking him what he had given me in the other dream. Each of his theatrical answers brought me closer to aggravation, for each was just as cryptic as the previous one; each was overlaid and characterized by that same espionage whispering—again after again. What was he afraid of, I wondered? Who was he afraid of? I owed him the money, and it had been a transaction between just him and I—and within the confines of a dream. Why was he acting so paranoid?

Again, as in our last Matrix exploration, it began to get dark. In the emergence of my bus arriving, I finally told him I had to go and thrust two fivers into his hand, carefully watching his face for my last try at finding a satisfying response which would assuage my fears over covering my debt to him and keeping clear my precious debtor’s name.

The last expression I saw on his face instantly seemed to sag at his jowls; therein, also, was where I saw his deepest hurt. It had the appearance of broken pieces of something weird, a kind of distorted gloriole waving like a set of worms upon his skin—even like millions of bits of broken shard protruding out of and shining every which way, all over his countenance. Indeed, I could almost feel the pain in each of his pores which just had to be crying from the knife angles evident in each shard. With a vividness that only occurs in dreams, I peered into each sweat cavity on his cheeks, and they all seemed to ooze blushes of ghastly changing colors of pale. This was an altogether new expression; I had never seen this before—on anyone.

To describe the meaning of it in our modern tech-changed world, it could only be related, compared, or defined by sets of words like: a montage of fractured fractals of crypto-belief; for it exactly resembled something real and valuable to mankind, but also appeared incredulous. It was a something that appeared quite there but then again, not there. It reminded me of the crypto coin anomaly, while at the same time resembling an infinite number of virtual particles—and all of these representations exuding directly at me from his face. Worst of all they pointed meanly at my character, my essential me, as if I was to be blamed. I felt like I was being hammer-smithed, folded, and then blamed and hammer-smithed again, all within the forge of a final Hell that was heated seven times hotter than usual.

All the while this was hot-flashing over me, he never stopped holding the fivers motionless in his fist. And not once did he ever stop twitching his facial demons at me. That image of the fivers itself was also full of micro-expressions that brooded of disbelief as they doubled, engraved, and heated my hurt feelings regarding the whole apparition. He remained mimed like that, the money I owed was still out-held, and his face, though static, continued to laser forth cross-beams of new micro-aggressive intentions. It was like I had not even placed the bills in his hands; like he was one of those life-like historical statues frozen in the scene of another time. In trying to make sense of the whole thing, I concluded that it was, as it were, a false paradigm in which someone was attempting to expound on the historical glories of another time by comparing a reared, sculpted rider with the high maneuvers of a Maserati.

By then my bus had opened its doors, so hurriedly I said: you okay…but he never answered, and anyway, I needed that non-committal macro-flub from him to finally give me expulse to yank away with relief from our mysterious development. During that moment of turning, even though I knew I was in dream, I hoped in resolve to never meetup with that face again.

As the bus rattled through its stops I continued to feel full of questions regarding all of his eerie replies. I held my face to the cool of the window. The darkness of the night was on the outside but my friend’s face was on my side, superimposed onto my half-reflection. I found it impossible to avoid how my face darkened and lightened as each street light peered in and left, peered in and waned by as the bus moved into and away from each light-safehouse. No matter what I tried, I just could not forget his look of deep sour. The more I kept his face, the more I read from it. Even this far from him, I could still see no long-suffering in it, no forgetting on his part, and deep within my throat and down behind my breast bone I could feel the acid of it hurting and burning my inner man, as if I had done something foul and very wicked.

All of this held worry and angst for me like I had never experienced before in a dream—my dream. This was my dream! I was the one whose brain was in matrix, and I should have been able to control everything—including his happiness. This, I guess, was what perplexed me the most. His gargoyle face was disturbing enough, but I really took hotness at the fact that somehow he had taken over my dream and turned my return of his money from honor and respect to afflicted, dead donuts.

That's what made me hate that dream; made me have disgust for most of my other dreams afterward. I think the hating began because of the deep importance I attach to righteousness. I have always had an affinity toward choosing the right. So, now, after maturing in faith for so long, I found myself faced with the realization that even in my own dreamtime it was impossible to keep clear my own good standing. But even further, I found underscoring to the Spirit of Truth's saying about the mind being so deceitful and changeling; in fact the mind is so shifting that an individual cannot know it, trust it, or account for the origin of its wickedness. Even a small thinking session with this realization drives any sincere one to the cry: oh, who can deliver me from the body of all my dreamtimes?!

When I woke up, I was angry again and invidiously fuming over how much I hated borrowing money in a dream. Borrowing money in a dream is at best a simple transaction, for one is just borrowing money from their own bank account. It is their dream. They know it is their dream because they were the first one to arrive in it and start wandering around. I think my anger repeats in part because, in my own dreams, I can never remember how much I owed. In their most vivid lucidness at best, my dreams are of no help to me in recalling the important detail about how much I rightly should repay. Perhaps, in future when I see myself approaching those ‘miles to go before I sleep’, I would be more successful if I promised not to do things like that anymore. But then again, if my own wakefulness has the same track record in righteousness as repeated in my dreams, does the answer to my deliverance-cry in both dimensions lie in Christ alone? We should know for certain that this is so.

—Dumas fils