”I, frankly, don’t dream, because I want to remain happy,” the late film actor Om Puri from India told a newspaper. ”When you dream too much and the dream doesn’t come true, you hurt yourself. And I don’t want to hurt myself. So I don’t dream. I take things as they are.”
Do you agree with what Om Puri says? Could you live your life without dreams because you were afraid of getting hurt if they didn’t come true?
A friend told me he doesn’t dream
He told me that he liked it that way and he preferred to stay grounded in reality
How (stupid) strange this was to me
Some of my best memories are dreams I’ve had
Some of the most inspiring, motivating, breath-taking, and
absolutely horrifying
moments I’ve experienced in my life were of dreams.
If I didn’t have dreams
I would be even duller than I am already (that’s pretty dull)
He passed me the blunt
I asked him if he was scared (I get scared when I go to sleep, mind you) to dream
He said no, but rather, he was happier for it.
I laughed. I couldn’t help myself.
The whole thing just seemed ludicrous to me!
How does one simply not dream, and then feel better without even experiencing it?
inhaled,
I considered the massive canvas within my subconscious that hid away an entire universe unknown to the waking eye
exhaled
He explained that he typically had had horrible night terrors as a child and he just couldn’t deal with it anymore
He couldn’t deal with his dreams? His fears?
I passed it back
I tried to explain how my nightmares always end up being my favorite dreams
How the feeling of true
fear
is such a rare thing and a dream is the only place you can really safely work with it
he inhales
exhales
He asks me why I would want to feel fear.
As the air turned cooler and soon colder, I had to think about that.
I looked for the moon, and found it.
I looked at that moon for a long time. (something about a supermoon that night?)
He passed it to me, and without dropping my gaze, I inhaled.
What was it about the moon that seemed so surreal?
As if all the secrets of spirituality were hidden in a giant rock in the sky.
exhale
He laughs and I realize I had never answered him
and as I sit here typing this (sober, mind you)
I still can’t seem to really find a clear answer to that question.
Of course, I can provide one.
“It’s a powerful, unique feeling. Nothing feels like fear other than fear.”
It’s special.
But that’s not it.
Tonight, the answer to fear, in my opinion, is simply hidden away
within the visage of the moon.
Now I look for the moon, and there is no sign of it tonight.
I think back to that night when I went home,
and I remembered that
I had no dreams at all.
I breathe in
I breathe out