• Friday, March 29, 2024
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The playground of my dreams

Dream

I am quite a dreamer and I love my quirky often times very colourful dreams when I sleep. Last night I was involved with one of my fetishes, shoes. Strappy sandals, wedges in oh, the most colourful hues. I tried on about ten shoes, all my specifications in all the right colours. With toes daintily manicured and fresh off a spa, I was quite the belle and I woke up with a silly satisfied smile on my face.

My nighttime dreams are sometimes spent in the company of Presidents in farfetched lands or a residue of a movie that really impacted me. Sometimes I am in a garden as vast as the ones my favourite character in Children’s fiction travelled through. Lewis Carroll’s Alice, in “Alice in Wonderland”. This is what dreams are made of in real life and I would wonder off at age eight with Alice into the Rabbit’s hole or take a bite of a mushroom that shrinks Alice or increases her in height and weight. It was my go-to book as a young girl and I still read it from time to time.

I mean, who would not want to be invited to a totally crazy tea party. Other times I am running as fast as I can from fierce dogs that want to tear at my legs, tendon and muscle and I am running exhaustively as fast as I can but on the same spot. You know that dream, right? Wink! We all have had them some time in our lives. Those child-like dreams that make you go “Phew! That was close” as if you were a cartoon character. Dreams come in different ways and only if I am troubled and gone deeply spiritual that I occasionally have dreams that are trenchant and come true like my elder sister, Architect Eucharia Alozie who is mildly psychic.

Being able to see things and dream things can be a burden and you have to carry the world and other people’s problems on your shoulder

 

But being able to see things and dream things can be a burden and you have to carry the world and other people’s problems on your shoulder. Me, I like the simple dreams that make me run fast to nowhere and the ones that make me try on designer shoes only to find it was all in a dream. There is a certain childlike quality conferred on you when you dream those dreams that are funny or quirky or fairy tale like. If you lose your child like quality, you lose those dreams. I like my ability to be like a child, laugh heartily, forgive (although its hard) and see beauty in everything.

But I am also a day dreamer and have been since I was a child. I was that student that was constantly being pulled from the playground back into class. I am in there but occasionally float out of the room and only the voice of my teachers, Mrs Oparaugo, Mrs Gwendolyn Nwachukwu or the maths teacher, Mrs Rasekoala would snap me out of my dream like state. I dream in real life ambitiously in technicolour as if I could save the world. I am constantly dreaming of projects and these days I am an ideas bank with 100 different things I would like to do. I want to learn how to paint, I want to start a school, I want to own a hotel, I want to travel the world, I want to write three more books. And while I am day dreaming, I am lucky to have family who can say, plan it, you can’t do them all at once but my heart tells me I can and I am just excited at the thought.

But it is that child-like quality that has kept me creative, that allows me to write and believe that I can. It is that side of me that sees things differently from other people and truly believe that where there is a will there is a way. It is that thing which is indescribable that ensures that I try to be happy no matter what’s going on around me. If I cannot find the happiness quickly, I create my own bubble. That girlish giggle, seeing the funny in everything and believing the storm will pass has translated into my happy dreams.

It does not mean that I do not get sad or overwhelmed. It means I try to move past it as quickly as I can. I do not do melancholy or let it hover over me or it becomes a habit. I have seen too many depressed people and it aint funny. Difficult to cure. In these difficult times, returning to your childhood self might be therapeutic.

Don’t worry, be happy!