Dreams are weird.
My dreams never seem to make sense, and more often than not they end up being less than fun for me. When I was around six years old, I had this really freaky subconscious adventure involving a psychotic murderous clown, an endless chase, and an office desk. I don’t really want to elaborate on that, but I will say this: I have been terrified of clowns ever since that night.
Why do dreams always have to be so strange? Why do we even have them? I always tend to fall asleep when a friend begins recounting some escapade they flew through under the cover of slumber as soon as their explanation starts to waver―as soon as I have to put any effort into understanding dreams, I give up. But we must be having these midnight movies for a reason, right? Nothing in this world is pointless. There must be order in a chaotic world.
People, I think, are inherently complex. Every person contains so much―so many hopes and beliefs and thoughts and intentions and wishes―that it’s impossible to know them all. It’s impossible to completely dissect a person like a heart in biology class. Instead these multitudes tangle up, twisting and morphing into a huge bundled knot that can never be fully untied. When I consider all the complexities of humanity itself―a pretty deep topic, and one that I can get lost in if I let myself―I think that maybe dreams are reflection of who I am deep inside, the person nobody can really see or hear. She’s constantly buried underneath layers and masks―the costumes we inadvertently wear―and permanently trapped during the day. At night, though, she can roam free.
Maybe that’s why my dreams are always so erratic.
When I first heard of Stephen Hawking’s theory of the expanding universe, it opened me up to the idea that we’re surrounded by infinities: There are universes in which my best friend and I have never met and universes in which we’re twins; there are galaxies that have never known war and planets void of fruits besides bananas. Maybe there’s a universe my dream self rules over, uninhibited by the chains of what we call reality. I wonder what her life is like.
My dad asked me once if I thought dreams could become reality. “No,” I scoffed, 10 years old and only concerned with what was for dinner.
“But if you’re sleeping, how do you know that being awake is true reality? You don’t really know, do you?” He was only playing around―Inception-ing his kid in a time when Inception hadn’t yet been created―but even still that thought stuck in my head: How do we know our reality is the real one?
This doesn’t work for a bunch of boring practical reasons, but if for a moment I suspend my disbelief―just for a second―the universe seems to widen just a bit more.
I enjoy consistency in my regular life―my daily life. I wake up. I go to school. I do my homework. I eat my dinner. I shower. I sleep. There’s comforting repetition there, stability in the expectation that there will, in all likelihood, not be any crazy deviations from the standard march.
It’s not quite the same when I dream.
Dreaming transports me to another dimension: I’m a different person, thinking different thoughts and living a different life. The universe is truly infinite, and I’m not bound by the rules of space and time to travel wherever I choose. And even in travelling to unexpected places, places that I haven’t marked on my mental road map, there’s exhilaration in dreaming that can’t be accurately replicated by the wildest Earth-bound scenarios.
To dream is to liberate, to escape, to embrace infinity.
Dream big.
Dream on.
Dream forever.
—By Victoria C., 18, Alberta, Canada