The Road to 40 Day 312/365: Dreams and Daydreaming

For those who have known me for a long time, they would know that I am unapologetic when it comes to sleep.

I take pride in having slept at different angles, and once even slept while standing. It was after a party, and even without having slept yet, we all decided it was a good idea to attend mass at 4am.

Dreams, for me, are like endless TV shows that somehow feel real. While I fear death the most, I sometimes calm myself down with the thought that maybe once I close my eyes, I’ll be in one of those dreams.

There are even times that I would think that maybe I’ve already passed away, and I’m just living in an elaborate dream. However, I quickly shoot that idea down whenever I realize I still haven’t won the lottery. I mean, if I’m already dreaming, why wouldn’t I make myself rich?

When I walk or run, I get immersed in the conversations of the podcasts I’m listening to, or play scenarios in my head when I could dissect the lyrics of the songs I play. While I am still aware of what’s happening around me, I don’t really mind anything else because I’m already lost in the sounds I’m listening to.

Weirdly, I feel uncomfortable with the deafening silence when I’m walking alone without music or podcasts. I feel like I need to be listening to something when I’m doing something alone so that I can get lost in my own thoughts, but won’t feel like I’m actually alone.

Meanwhile, some of my dreams when I sleep are things I give meaning to. When I was a kid, I think seeing Peter Pan take the kids to a star made a lasting impression on me. Since then, I’ve always thought of each individual star as a dream I can jump into when I sleep.

I think I was in third grade when we had a nightly walk with my dad and my siblings around the village. While we walked, I distinctly remember getting fixated on a star. When I slept, I had a very memorable dream that involved a few adventures. By the end of it, the girl I was with kept telling me to go to this portal, but I refused to go without her.

When she pushed me in, I suddenly woke up. I tried to sleep again to get to the same dream, but I couldn’t.

As I grew older, I was given another notion about dreams – that if it’s something horrible, you should tell the person involved so that it doesn’t happen. However, when it’s too absurd, I don’t believe it’s going to happen even if I don’t tell the person.

Since I’ve been away from a lot of people I grew up with, what I do is I reach out to the people I dream about, even if it’s a good dream. I’ve always taken it as a sign to reach out to them.

Maybe I haven’t thought about them enough, or maybe I’ve been thinking about them without me knowing. Either way, when I dream of someone, I just talk to them about it.

Sometimes, I’m met with skepticism – “are you in the insurance industry now?” would be a common hypothesis. But truly, it’s just me reaching out to say hi.

The other day, I had a dream about Josef, a good friend who passed away a couple of years back. In my dream, I woke up because I saw him in a dream. So I messaged his wife to tell her about everything that happened in that dream. During this time, I weirdly still saw him, and we were just making fun of each other as we always did.

In that dream, he wrote something on my phone, something about being proud of his wife coming into her own. I cried uncontrollably when I read it, and suddenly, I woke up.

Dude decided to appear in an Inception dream. When I woke up, I’ve already forgotten a lot of the details that I had in the other dream.

Still, I messaged Ate I for what it’s worth.

I don’t know what people think about the crazy dreams I have when I reach out to them, but personally, I’m just happy that I get to tell them a fun story on a random day.

Talking about dreams, Vino and I overslept on the bus this day, so we missed our stop going home. We can’t be mad at each other for it, though, because we both know we were at fault.

Instead, it was just another teaching opportunity on what to do if you missed your stop.