I fall into a deep restful sleep, but it’s one full of dreams. Not lucid dreams, but extremely vivid dreams. In one dream I have just purchased a new house. There’s this weird feature to the heating system where there is a vent that is about 18 inches wide by 9 inches tall and it goes through the outer wall of the house into a box that is about 24 inches deep. I can see through the wall of the house (it’s transparent) and see furnace-like workings in the box. The really strange thing though is the air in the house goes through this box and just out to the outside, so there is a constant flow of heated air (it’s winter) pouring out of the house to the outside. This makes no sense to me even though I know it’s the way it was designed. I grab a piece of cardboard and just out of curiosity place it over the grate to see what will happen. Immediately I know I’ve done something wrong. The box starts to make weird noises and a voice comes out of nowhere. I recognize it as the voice of the person who sold us the house. She knows exactly what I have done and says I have seriously damaged the HVAC system. I look at the box again and the inner works are now on fire.
She tells me it’s going to be a couple of thousand dollars worth of damage at least. I’m mortified. She says it happens fairly often and she will cover the cost this time, but I’m thinking “How am I going to tell Ty I did something this stupid?” It’s not the money, but the embarrassment. It’s one of those moments when you do something on the spur of the moment and wish you could go back in time to change it. I just want to disappear off of the face of the Earth. The great thing about dreams is often at the lowest moment or the moment of greatest danger, I can simply wake myself up. this is one of those times.
I “wake up” and I’m in a room full of people. I’m at a meeting that hasn’t started yet. I’ve never seen any of these people in my waking life, but in my dream, I know them. I tell them about my awful dream that I just had and how I was so happy to wake up in my bed and realize it was just a dream. This, this is real life. Here in this room with these people. It feels so real to me. I am 100% confident that now I’m awake whereas before I was sleeping. The dream goes on. I go to to work. I make a sale (I’m back at IBM). It’s real to me. Then, I wake up in my bed and realize I had one of those dream within a dream things that I have every once in a while. Now I’m really back in reality.
This life sometimes feels so real, but increasingly I am realizing this is not the ultimate reality. I got to sleep perchance to dream and I escape this “reality” that now as often as not seems like a nightmare. I go down a level of consciousness to escape this level of consciousness and it brings fleeting temporary relief. But, one day in the not too distant future I will be awakened from this level to a higher level, a greater reality, and this will seem as ethereal and fleeting as the dreams I had last night. And, for this morning of the 238th day, that is the thought I carry with me to give me the strength to soldier on.
