Dreaming

Dreaming

I awaken from dreams and feel immersed in dreams still. The room looks familiar – yet it disappears repeatedly into one strange scene after another, each of which emerges full-blown as though already in the middle of a complex plot.


Suddenly I recall that I am lying in bed attempting to wake up. What did that last dreamy episode mean? God knows. I can make no sense of it and feel frustrated by this bobbing from one unreality to the next. Where is solid ground? Why can’t I wake up, once and for all?

Reflection suggests that the history of my life is pretty much a string of “dreams” – events that seemed visceral and intense at the time but were unconscious of the deeper truth of being. Meanwhile this very day is apparently beginning as another episode in the continuing illusion of wakeful living. Maybe that’s not how it really is, but that’s how it seems at 5 A.M.


It is weird to live as a caricature of one’s own self – as an actor or pretender to the throne, out of focus, disconnected, like an important electrical circuit were missing or non-functional. To feel that someone else could live this life better and make a go out of what has been a near constant turn into confusion and quagmire.

This is what the dream does – it has no firm conclusion. It doesn’t connect. It is not even a cliff-hanger because its plot is not coherent enough for that. It simply vaporizes out of one bizarre scene and reformulates into something else equally nonsensical.


God, it is such a strain to be human! Who came up with this cosmic scheme in which truth is so difficult to identify? I’d like to say it just doesn’t work for me, but no one is asking my opinion – no one that counts.



And that’s the dream – awareness not being able to make sense of its surroundings and feeling alien in its own experience, whether in bed at night or walking around during the day. But maybe the good news is in noticing . . . that it is just a dream.



So here's one of my tunes, "Sleepy Time," with yours truly making music.