Can a dream keep you alive? What happens when that dream loses its potency? Or else morphs into something else, something terrifying?
“I have a dream,” Dr King said but was it a dream or merely a hope or even a vision? The three are quite distinct but in this context are all positive. What if they sour? Where does that leave the visionary, or the hoper, the dreamer?
Is reality an escape from our nightmares or a dream an escape from a present hell? Why can we remember some dreams or their elements but not all? Why when I wish to dream and remain sleep I cannot but when I dream I waken too quickly? My memories become entangled within my dreams making a firm foundation crumble. Who can I trust – my memory or a dream?
I live in a limbo that borders the two, each day and night an extension of the last. My mind latches on to the loves once present. I can see their faces, my daughters and my wife. They wave to me, all smiles. An ache resounds within – something wrong, a falsehood. The cruelest of jokes have been played again and I have succumbed to it. Was it God who pranked me or my own mind? Real or not the pain remains and another jagged memory formed to prick my conscience.
Most here relish their beds. They stuff tablets down to stay there. It is beyond me. What if I dream and despise it but my body cannot awake? Like walking into a bear trap willingly it is idiocy. Yet I am in a quandary. Awake in hell or asleep in hell with the possibility of heaven? Those smiling faces can only exist in the latter.
My future holds no light of life, snuffed out by my own hand. I waited for mercy but it only surfaced in my dreams. To hug my children and the woman that still holds my heart; that was once my vision, my hope, my dream. Now it is banished to the netherworld and on I float too afraid to end it, for therein is the greatest fear of all. What if I die in my dream tonight? Forever locked in hell, not knowing if I am truly there – that is the stuff of nightmares.
I do not wish to dream. I do not wish to wake. What I wish for I cannot have and never will. My wish to have a voice and declare my soul only bounces as an echo around my mind. And that’s ultimately what a dream is.
Read Lee Harding’s The Oracle 1.0 to see how this story influenced the writing style of that novel