Escape Characters

The last thing you remember

I generally don't sleep very well. I'm not sure exactly why, though I have some ideas. I have a bad habit of staying up too late of my own accord, either plinking about on a keyboard towards problems that won't be solved, or video games, or Alaska's tendency to being light at all hours of the night. I also live with and around people who don't work, don't work often, or only work half the time, which makes their schedules and mine slightly at odds. That I try to keep their schedules in addition to my own standard-issue 8-to-5 routine is no fault of theirs, but demeaning my masculinity when I decide I won't play another round of Halo isn't exactly blameless either. There's also the fun fact that if I sleep in the right/wrong position (best I can determine, it is on my left side), my back will, for the best I can categorize it, "get out of place," leaving me in pain until I wake up and start moving again.

None of these factors of my poor sleeping habits are anything new. In fact, my sleeplessness is well documented over the last few years in what I recounted of my dreams and recorded via idkfa. Reading through some lately I'm glad I did jot these down, as some are pretty choice. I'm also sad that as my grains continue to align with everybody else's grains, I no longer have time to do so, or at least not enough time before I forget about my dreams completely.

So, rather than offering you a new and bizarre example of why I'm so tired all the time, I submit an old dream. One that I remember every once in a while, like a high pitched tone that you only hear when it's absolutely quiet, however rarely it is absolutely quiet.

I had a dream. At least a decade ago. At the very least. I don't know exactly because I never recorded it anywhere, which is unfortunate, but maybe for the better. The dream was of a girl I'd known in first grade. She wore a green dress. We were friends, the best I can remember, though really, I don't remember much, not even her name. I think at the time (this decade and some ago, not when I was in first grade), I had been toying with the idea that dreams are your mind reorganizing information, and if necessary, discarding it if when presented to your sleeping conscience it elicits no reaction. I'm still not convinced that this is wrong, but I'll venture now that it is probably a lot more complicated.

Either way, I woke that morning to a vivid, more-than-life-like image of someone from my childhood who I had all but forgotten. I was amazed, not only at my recall for someone or something that had happened in what seemed like ages past, but for being able to recall the exact feeling I had at the time. This girl, whom I barely remember, was potentially the person who made me feel the happiest that I'd known in my entire life. And, in waking, I realized I had no idea why.

I'm aware that dreams are rarely representations of memories. Even if they are, they are so distorted that the representation is nothing like the original event. I had to question the validity of this memory of the girl in green. Was it a fabrication? Were we really friends? Was I just dreaming that I knew her? Thinking back, it was first grade: I only had two best friends, of which both competed for my friendship, and I have no reason to believe I wanted anything to do with girls in first grade (my sister consistenly gave a bad name to the rest of them). The dream, if true, was definitely counterintuitive to what I understood of my six-year-old psyche.

And yet, despite what I could tell myself to discount the dream's credibility, I could not shake it from my mind like every other day I'd woken up to something I didn't understand. It had shown me a time that I was happy, and when I didn't care about my constant descent into adulthood, when what mattered is that a girl in a green dress laughed at something I said. It had shown me a feeling that, even if I had never had it, seemed very real. And, for what I could remember, hadn't had it since.

I think that is why I remember this dream to this day, and why I dredge it up every once in a while without realizing it. It worries me now, as it did then, that if my mind was truly discarding that memory, it was discarding that feeling as well, which to this day I cannot recall past what's faded in the decade since. It may sound sappy, but to me it seems like forgetting happiness, the true happiness that we take for granted as a child, and that we can't help but covet when we're older.

I don't sleep very well, and thus can usually recall my dreams better than most folks, possibly because I'm half conscious when I'm dreaming. I haven't been dreaming much lately. I'll let you know if I do.