I have run ahead of myself, crashed into trees, been frightened by huge animals and jumped off a building, all in my dreams. Sometimes I am superwoman but most times something is chasing me and I am running as hard as I can on the same spot.
My dreams always seem to end when they are getting better, juicier and more exciting. Did the animal catch me? I will never know because I woke up in the nick of time. I am not sure if that dashing young man ever proposed ?(lol) and I don’t know if I ever took that trip to Antarctica sold to me by a travel agent in a snow-wrecked building where only two of us are having tea. Yes, I woke up but then I do not know how I would have reacted if the situation were real life.
These days my dreams are all muddled up, I may be in the U.S or I am travelling in my community all in the same dream. It’s even getting worse as I grow older. I will have a really vivid dream, then I will not remember a thing when I wake up. I think this is age but I cannot be sure because even little children forget their dreams.
Be that as it may, I find that some persons like my elder sister, the lovely Aunty Eucharia, is gifted in a psychic way and will dream interesting dreams which will fall into place. I do not have that gift and I am glad. I do not want to go around the world knowing what is about to happen to a cousin or a building. It is too much of a burden to bear. But those with the gift manage it well. My sister is always happy, loving and kind. Sometimes I wonder if this gift ever depresses her. She is just a sweet person through and through. So I am happy for my own situation. I believe God knows and understands us all. So he gives me these crazy dreams full of air and fun and creativity. I am constantly in cahoots with Elves and fairies and old men in caves. I am always running away from something, usually a huge furry animal. Guess what? They are often laughing and cackling, not in a bad way, but in a funny way which makes me laugh when I awake. By the way I get smaller and smaller as I am running.
I think this has to do with all the many fairy tales I read as a child now returning to bite me in my latter years in a pleasant pleasurable way.
I read the incredibly exciting book, Alice in wonderland by Lewis Carroll as a 15year old and now I can see sometimes traces of this in my dreams. A talking rabbit, a tea party with a mad hatter and a Queen who yells ‘off with her head’. Alice eats a mushroom that increases her size and other things happen that make her smaller. Then she falls into a hole and arrives in a different world. It’s in my dreams, now everywhere; I shrink and increase (lol)
But I have also been in some scary situations in dreams; the toothless woman with scattered hair trying to bite me, the plane that flew with only one wing and the news of a funeral of a loved one.
Dreams are larger than life and often times they just reflect our thoughts, our inner minds and what bothers us.
In real life, I am a daytime dreamer’s dreamer. I dream large. I own the world in my dreams. I reach for the skies. I think out of the box. The ones that come when I am asleep, I have no control over. However, I control my real life dreams and by golly, I have owned my dreams in spite of people who fail to dream and want to muscle yours; in spite of people who appear to have come out of my nightmare, I never cease to dream, for to stop dreaming is to die. I love to travel. I dreamt it; I believed it and I have travelled to all but one of the continents of the world. The ones I dream at night if they are good and fun, I laugh, if they are scary, I pray.
As for the real life dreams, I still have several I want to attain. I want to visit St. Petersburg in Russia during the white summer nights when it is daytime continuously for two weeks. Night never falls, that will be a joy. I wonder if I will sleep in these two weeks when I don’t see nightfall.
I want to visit Robben Island and see Mandela’s prison cell .I want to go to the North Pole and wear so much clothes I cannot see my hands for days. These are doable and I will find the time even though I am so busy.
I still want to fly a plane.* Well, as dreams go, we’ll see!
• This was written before the Malaysia plane went missing.
Eugenia Abu
