What Dreams May Come

I’ve just awoken from a bizarre dream.  In this dream, my husband’s best friend shot and killed a boy nobody liked.  He shot him with his cellphone.  

His cellphone?

 

In the dream, I was at the scene of the “crime” begging the friend to just leave the boy alone.  I was filled with the dread of knowing what was going to happen before it happens.  I was everywhere at once.  I was watching from behind a bathroom door, I was struggling with the friend in the kitchen, I was looking at the screen of the cellphone.  I was fretting over how this would ruin his career as a teacher.

Then, suddenly, I was in a room full of kids — my kids, the friend’s kids, all the kids in our social circle.  I was putting laundry away and one of the kids started asking me the whereabouts of the boy nobody liked.  I knew he was dead, but said nothing.

I woke myself up.

 

At the end of the Kings Cross chapter of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Harry asks Dumbledore one final question: “Tell me one last thing,” said Harry. “Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?”

Dumbledore replies: “Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?” 

When I read that aloud to my kids a few weeks ago, they were immediately struck by Dumbledore’s response.  They asked me to repeat it, and then both of them slowly repeated it until they’d memorized it and they repeated it yet again.  

 

When Miles suggests that he and Eli climb Mt. Everest, they turn immediately to the task of packing their rucksacks with plastic blocks that are “really” food.  Eli’s blue elephant Joopy is a Yogi, a Shaman, a Guru.  He has been everywhere, done everything.  Nevermind that he’s “actually” only a plush rug with an oversized stuffed head.  The wall between fantasy and reality remains permeable for them.

There are days that I long to live in the reality that exists only in my head.  But it seems that one of the things we lose as we become adults is the unshakeable confidence that our fantasy world is as real as the cup of iced coffee resting beside my keyboard.  Of course, our own certainty in the demarcation between imagined and real exists on a shifting foundation.  A friend of a friend is grappling with paranoia lately and it has reminded me how fragile our grasp on the world can be.

So, this morning, awakening from a dream of murder by cellphone, I’m thankful for the moist, cool sensation of touching a plastic cup.