Dreamland

I love to dream. My most fantastic creations come in the hours just before dawn, after I’ve wakened and done what was needed to be done, and then fallen back into fitful slumber. This is prime time, my promised land of dreams.

But the problem with my dreams is that upon wakening, they go flitting off to the place where dreams go to die. They may leave a brief and faint footprint on the shoreline of my mind, but even these get washed away with the incoming tide of a new day. Only the mystery remains.

I’ve been so obsessed with dreams of late that for the past several days I’ve been working on a short story about a young Goan boy who invents…. No; sorry. I’m not ready to let that cat of the bag just yet; when it appears in The New Yorker, I’ll be sure to let you know. Suffice it to say that the Bard had it right when he penned “We are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep.”

There is a school of thought that ponders the question, “What if dreaming is the whole point of sleep?” Now this intrigues me! Does that mean I don’t really need eight hours of beauty sleep every night? Just some aboriginal dream time? Fine by me!

Neuroscience and the inner workings of the brain are beyond my ken. I can’t keep up with my own rapid eye movements, let alone yours. I know I CAN dream. I just can’t remember my dreams the next day. You would think that someone—some purveyor of artificial intelligence—could devise a dreamcatcher, a device that would capture and record our dreams, then download them to an App on a smart phone. That way, when we awake, we could just push the play button and watch all our dreams over and over until we finally deciphered their hidden meanings. Maybe we could even email them to a therapist for analysis and interpretation. Good idea? Hmmm… Come to think of it, maybe dream ignorance is bliss. Do we really want to know what it’s all about, Alfie?

And yet, science tells us, humans, and probably animals too, are committed to dreaming. If it’s true that we indeed spend about two hours every night dreaming, and if you do the math, that works out to an entire month spent in dreamland every year, not an insignificant portion of our lives. But, if you’re like me, and all your dreams die with daylight, doesn’t all that dreaming seem like a giant waste of time? And yet it’s not. I can say this because I rarely have unpleasant dreams; weird, maybe, but not unpleasant and hardly ever a nightmare. I tend to wake up whistling.

I get the feeling that my dreams are trying to tell me something, but that they’re speaking a language I don’t understand. I WANT to understand my dreams; I TRY to remember them; it’s just that when I wake up, I’m grabbing at ghosts who are gone with the sunrise. Sigh.

Maybe I’ll have to settle for daydreams. Maybe I’ll follow in Walter Mitty’s footsteps and invent an entire secret life to live, a shadow of the one I’m living. Don’t get me wrong: I’m a lucky guy and many of my dreams have come true. It’s just that my nocturnal visions are so vivid, so whacky, so not me, that I’d like to discover some way of settling in to watch them instead of the nightly news. That’s usually a nightmare!

I’ll be right back.

Jamie Kirkpatrick is a writer and photographer who lives in Chestertown. His work has appeared in the Washington Post, the Baltimore Sun, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, the Washington College Alumni Magazine, and American Cowboy Magazine.

His new novel, “The Tales of Bismuth; Dispatches from Palestine, 1945-1948” explores the origins of the Arab-Israeli conflict. It is available on Amazon.