Reconnecting

I’m consumed with learning everything I can about dreams. Perhaps, it’s due to the lack of dreams in my own life. I don’t know why I am drawn to the subject. However, something recently reinforced my passion for understanding more. I actually remembered a dream that I had, which almost never happens.

The dream unfortunately was not anything worth remembering. It was actually quite troubling. I jerked awake from the dream, a sort of silence washing over every inch of me. That shouldn’t happen. It most definitely should not happen to me. I know which parts of the brain are active while dreaming, I know the pathways of the neurons intermingling, I know the development of dream research; most importantly, I know that my dream most likely has nothing to do with my waking hours. That said, knowing all that did not diminish the impact of the dream.

To be honest, I was troubled by my dream but what was even more horrific was the fact that I was unable to distinguish it from reality. I did not know if it was indeed a dream or simply a bad memory that I had when I was young. The inability to determine if the dream was actually a memory or simply a by product of random brain impulses seemed to still me. I craved to understand if my dream was merely a distant memory, one that had evaded me until now.

I am not alone in this. Reading the dream journals I have collected give me a semblance of comfort. I have read similar accounts of dreams that resemble elusive memories. The journals are replete with worries that a dream might become reality. They remind me of the people behind my research, the stories that are being told in the background. They remind me to keep questioning in order to find answers to these seemingly unimportant problems. Reading the dream journals of my peers have helped me reconnect with that which made me begin this research. I now have faces to the work I am attempting to take on.

I have learnt a lot about dreams. Yet, I have not escaped their clutches. But I have hope that I am going somewhere. After all, now that the dream has faded, I can think clearly and I can know that whether it was a memory or a fragmented narrative randomly played, it had no effect in my future. Is knowing and recognizing the impact enough, then?