Wake Me to Wonder

"In my dream someone came to me, herself troubled, labored a whisper in my ear..."

**********

Dear Alex,

You have been praying, dreaming, wondering. Dreams don’t lie, their smell and smoke seeping through souls. A prophet or prankster, an English patient or pirate, you are awakened to your dream re-lived twice now from chamber to circumstance in character and costume for live drama. We are who we dream of.

But it’s complicated and simple altogether - the wonderment of dreams. Things are not quite the way they seem to look or whisper. XXX might as well be nameless or faceless among common English first names latched on faces commonly called by names. What is clear turns cloudy, parallel universes collapse, brothel becomes blood bank.

YYY’s brother XXX has committed a lewd act in public while ZZZ perpetuates a slew of lewdness in private. The dreamer awakens to her dream in hyper-reality, writing on the wall or mobile screen. Patent transparency.

I’ve had a recurring dream - or perhaps closer to a nightmare or mere light into my paranoia. This particular dream has taunted me with the same scene and subjects a few rounds a year:

I would be X in high school with Y’s and Z’s, trying to tackle my homework and tests in the same 3 classes, Math and History and Sciences, but never catching up, asking God for success or wisdom or power or fame, wondering why he would not give it to me. I would wake to my dream to pursue some more. Sweating sorrow, neglect accused, no further articulation needed from my messenger, my dream.

Is this a skeleton or weapon in suspense or pretense? On dreamland or wasteland, crawling with the weight of control, the dreamer and dream make magic under cover or in the crossfire of fireworks working up to wake you up in wonder.

Yours, Kate