Speaking of dreams…

I used to know when I was dreaming, at a very early age.

Maybe when language had finally made sense to me, I was forming, not only complete sentences, but fully articulated ideas and scenarios, in which to construct an interpreted reality inside my mind. Of course, these fantasies were uncluttered by the filters, emotional scarring and conflicting morals that came along with life experiences.

And even as a young boy, I knew these realities were too clean for what the authentic account of our world entailed. I’d crouch down in the fetal position on the floor of my dream, shut my eyes tight and pray to wake up. I wanted to once again feel something real, however tainted its true identity.

I grew older, more wise, cataloguing a cacophony of memories, thoughts, ideas, wishes, concepts, emotions, attitudes, personalities, accents, sins, virtues, lies, truths, half truths… a severely wrinkled, grey area.

These signature marks on my more mature perspective deepened the complexity of an adult mind and I could no longer tell the difference between dream and reality, at the height of REM.

The maze of my mind had become too complicated. Unknowingly, asleep, I was trapped. You see the wide, bird’s eyed ego of my awake self sat perched atop a concealed iceberg-like id, underwater stretching infinitely beyond the bounds of the Great Barrier Reef. While under, snorkeling, snoring, deep-diving these coral depths, I got lost in its intertwining, ever-shifting intricacies that linked path upon path of a bottomless marine rabbit hole.

Eventually, I’d awake. My light mind would float to the top at dawn, like the multifaceted orb in a Magic 8-ball.

In one of these lucid daytimes, at last, a moment of clarity in the crisp ocean air. If I could dream within dreams, layered like an onion, like Russian nesting dolls, innumerable levels thick, if I could jump between these levels that sequenced in a Fibonacci spiral tunneling within the coral reef that was my brain stem, then perhaps a reality awaited above even the apex of our collective cerebral cortex. Perhaps we weren’t the biggest Russian doll.

Perhaps, this communal consciousness was yet another underneath layer, beneath ether unfathomable, in specific terms, but entirely conceivable in glimpses of brilliance, like the Sun poking through holes in the clouds.