Such Stuff As Dreams Are Made On

I told you my dream, although I know you don't remember. It's funny, I remember everything you say, everything you did, and you remember so little of me and mine. But I did tell you the dream, the morning I had it, and other times. I told you shyly, knowing it's importance. I probably explained there is a history in Jungian work regarding the power of the first dream, how it charts a course, sets a tone, tells the story even before we know there is a story to tell, let alone what is and how to tell it. I had a dream at the beginning of us, a first dream, and I brought it to you like a child brings a present of handpicked wild flowers, sweet but already wilting.

I believe dreams. I believe them more than I do “reality,” all the stuff that makes up the waking world. We are our truest, our most open, our most trusting in dreams. We are more real in the night time hours then we ever are in the light of day. To say, “I had a dream...” and “I have a dream ....” is to reveal the very soul of us.

So I told you my dream. In it we were old but young and we ran everywhere, exploring a world that wasn’t ours and yet was so much more ours than we ever imagined. A hotel, huge, magic, with thick wooded grounds, dark, shadowed halls, rooms brilliant with light, attics, cellars, everything. I held your hand and you held mine and there was nothing possessive in it, no mine, no yours, but an unspoken we and always. And no matter how the externals changed, the internal, the essentials, the core of us was this young pairing. We ran, we walked, we flopped and slept, we talked, always talk, and our bodies touched in all the un-self conscious ways children do, drawn to one another, following one another like dandelions the sun. I have held this first dream close, all these years, believed in it completely despite any and all evidence to the contrary. I have guarded it and treasured it and loved it fiercely even when I was the only one.

The hardest thing is to give up a dream, to think it the stuff of fantasy as opposed to the real and true. The first to come, it’s the last to leave, what you hold onto when there's nothing else. But leave it I think I must. Give up too. Let mother ocean wash the sticky remnants of it from my fingers, leaving salty residue with only me to know whether it is sea or tears. There is what I dreamed and what is and between them a chest split open, a heart broken, detours around blocks we can't get around any other way, bypasses so that we can live and perhaps even love again. Shakespeare was right. We are such stuff as dreams are made on.