Living Sleep

      I am a daydreamer. I am a dreamer. I am a dream and a nightmare.

      I, like a lot of you, get excited when I have a really good dream in my sleep, one that becomes memorable and means something to me. Though I cannot remember most of my dream last night, I do recall having boxes upon boxes of things I bought from the Weasley Wizard Wheezes (and trust me, if that store did exist, I would buy it out! Haha). In this dream, I was packing for college; it was my plan to bring all of those cool things, although my mother didn’t like the idea of me bringing some of the ones that would explode if you handled them a certain way. Haha, it’s too bad I don’t have any of those cool things, or else they would be here with me at college!     

      

      I have dreamt many other things though; and some of them were extremely violent, with me fighting for my life. However, despite having some intense nightmares as well as good dreams, I find them satisfying and thrilling. Why? Well, let me give you some ideas.

      We all find it easier to dream or daydream. That’s not hard to figure out; but once again, I must ask why? I believe it to be because we can have everything we want in them. We can finally have that one kiss we’ve always wanted, or be in that country that we’d only be able to imagine getting to in real life. Then again, what about the harsh dreams, the ones where we are fighting or fleeing? Even in these worlds, there is a sort of satisfaction; and that’s because despite the fear pumping through our veins, we still carry out what needs to be done. If we’ve got to fight back, our minds instantly say, “Do it! It’ll be worth it in the end!” Or if we’re running or trying to protect another person, our minds whisper, “You’re brave! With courage, you can win!”

      I laugh and smirk as I write this. That’s because I see something extremely ironic in these observations. In our sleep (nay, even when we doze off into a daydream), we know that in the end we’ll win. We know that one day, we can have something great; but what happens when you wake up? All those positive words of encouragement that your mind created in your sleep suddenly seem far away. We get out of bed, get dressed, eat breakfast, and go on with our normal lives, lives which most of us I’m sure are not even close to being fully happy with. We’re discontent. How come our lives are so boring? How come it hurts so much? Why can’t we just live in the stories we read and imagine, in dreams we dream?

      Well, here is the irony: the positive that we live out in our dreams is exactly what we should be telling ourselves in our everyday lives. When we are able to say in our sleep, “Fight! It’s worth it!” when we wake up, it turns into, “I can’t do this anymore. I just give up.” I’m not saying that each and every one of our dreams are good. Some of the are just plain awful, if there is no other word to describe it. However, maybe our dreams are trying to tell us something: that we are capable of winning, and that we can fight and know it’s for the better. In this world, it may not feel like we’ve got anything good, but that’s because we’ve got to look for it, and believe it’s there. The courage we need everyday is in our head; we just refuse to hear it when we’re awake.

      Just something to chew on for the day…but now, I must go into the reality of homework that needs to be read before tomorrow. I will take my dreams advice, and look at those books and say, “In the end, I can win!”