Morning Reality

I write in my dreams.  Really.  I woke up this morning, at my usual pre-corona time, to a sleeping house.  I was excited to write.  In the quite, next to the still-sleeping dog, with the warm coffee at my elbow, I opened the computer, bypassed the news and the social media begging for my attention, and went straight to my waiting blank page.

I had the words in my head, but they were all jumbled.  I had the ideas in my head, but the words didn’t quite catch them.  I knew what I wanted to write but it was fading fast.  I typed furiously, but when I paused to look at what had come out, it bore little resemblance to the writing of my dream.  My dream was full of metaphors and allusions and words pushed together in ways that made readers stop to consider the meaning and the figurative meaning and the story hidden behind even that.  My dream wrote perfectly nuanced phrases and cadenced sentences and Just Right paragraphs, that caught readers in the current and carried them gently along.

But the words that had tumbled out of me this morning couldn’t capture the dream, despite all of my very best attempts.  I had to accept the reality of my now fully conscious state:  that dream will forever be mine, it cannot survive the translation.

It is a lonely thing to know that there are pieces of our existence that can never be shared, no matter how desperately we want to understand or be understood.  While we can get almost to our core, almost to the heart of who we really are, with a few, select people (if we are lucky), the fact remains that there are fragments that will always stay in our dreams.