As a young adult and weighing forty kilograms, my dreaming became weightier than my mass.
I would wake up during these years and fill diaries recounting these dreams in minute detail, certain of their significance. Just as my eating disorder was a means of problem solving, roundaboutly (don’t deal with the issues troubling you, deal with what you can master – in this case how many calories you consume or don’t) so also was my dreaming. I have a lot to thank them for: the map for my fantasy novel I am forever working on came to me in one being one example. I woke up and sketched it and still have it. These dreams petered out as my eating disorder improved (perhaps because I was sleeping better; perhaps because I felt less troubled), and for many years they ceased altogether.
In many ways I missed them. They had a peculiar vibrancy that no real-life experience (chemically altered or not) has ever really matched; except in moments of high fever, except in moments of pain-soaked madness during labour. Some dreams would periodically return, those ones as many people have, such as teeth falling out, or flying, or, in my case, diving to the bottom of a deep pool and being unable to reach the surface again.
The worst kind of one re-visited me again last night. In it I scream and scream at a particular person, expunging all the hurt and dissatisfaction I – at least subconsciously – feel I need to say. Once upon a time, I would awake from this dream and feel refreshed. Lightened. And today I did – but only for a little while. As these hours have passed, I’ve been troubled. If I have these same dreams, how different am I really from that younger me, so immature in many ways. How have – or haven’t – I grown up?
Am I imagining these little dramas to replace old sensations or conjure new ones? Another question: why would I want do either?
