I had a spectacular dream last night - the kind of dream where you wake up wondering just how powerful your brain is.
While asleep, what little spare capacity seems to be left in my head decided it was time to crank out something worth watching - and created an entire play for me at the theater. I don’t remember all of the story, but I do remember that one of the actresses was a girl I used to work with. I think about her often - which perhaps explains why she arrives in my dreams from time to time.
Sometimes in crowds I will see the side of a face and a ponytail, and look twice - of course it is never her.
I wonder how she is, what she’s doing now, if she’s okay. I’ve tried to find her several times, but never got very far. I worry that putting too much effort into finding her will be seen as something else by others. She was perhaps the closest friend I had for several years - as Forrest might have said we “was like carrots and peas”.
Dreams are strange. Somebody can be gone from your thought for months, and then a cog turns somewhere in your head, and a living, breathing, laughing, crying simulcra is brought into existence to act out a story that you will not remember after a few fleeting waking moments - and yet the impact the dream has on you will remain for hours.
I am reminded of a passage from the wonderful poem “A Martian Sends a Postcard Home”;
At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs
and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.