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Good Dreams Gone Bad

“The art of life is the art of avoiding pain: & he is the best pilot who steers clearest of the rocks & shoals with which it is beset.”
– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Maria Cosway, 12 October 1786

            In his dreams, Tommy would sometimes be together again with Livy. Although the years had passed in his waking life, in his dreams, she was exactly as he remembered her – a sweet, six-year-old child who still loved her Dad. Nothing had changed in the place he went to in his sleep, and at first, he looked forward to these chance encounters as they were the only time he could still talk to his kid. The child in Tommy’s dreams had not been affected by the distance that now lay between them in the real world, had not yet become the child that her mother wished her to be. In his dreams, the father-daughter bond had not been broken, and life existed as it had before – before she had been taken away from him by the indifferent court system for the sake of “expediency”.

            Sometimes in the dreams they would be playing in the park again, with Tommy pushing her on the swings again like they had back in the day. At other times they would just talk the silly talk they had invented together or read Cinderella stories together before Tommy put her to bed at night. The happiest moments in these dreams came when Livy told him “I love you, Daddy” to which he was able to respond – in this ephemeral world that existed only in the land of dreams – that he loved her, too. In these dreams, nothing had changed between them, and everything was right again with the world.

            It was always a shock, though, when he opened his eyes and got dragged kicking and screaming back into the real world, the waking world, the world in which his daughter no longer existed for him. He inhabited this world alone, and he began to feel the dreams to be a cruel journey indeed into this land where happiness dwelt. The world that greeted him as he put the night behind him was one in which he had lost what was most precious to him – his only child. And he knew that when he lost her, he had lost the best part of himself – the part that gave without seeking recompense, the part that was capable of unconditional love and self-sacrifice. With the dawn came the tears, occasioned upon the realization that the tender feelings he had experienced in the landscape of his dreams were insubstantial ghosts, mere manifestations of his subconscious mind seeking to make sense of the trauma he had endured.

            And so, after a while, Tommy became apprehensive about his dreams. Not the comfort that it brought him being reunited with his daughter, of course, but the foreknowledge that when he awoke, the dreams would be shattered like fragile crystal upon a cold stone floor. With the fear came a reluctance to go to bed at night, and Tommy found himself falling asleep on the sofa night after night only after exhaustion finally took him down. Sleep became the enemy, a fearsome specter that haunted his nights. He was lucky, in fact, if he could manage four hours of sleep a night. While he suffered at his loss during the day, at least, he felt, it was something he could mostly control, something his rational mind and force of will he might overcome. He was helpless as a child in his sleep, visited by days long past that he could never hope to recover, and which vanished like the morning dew as the dawn arrived.

            Even worse than the dreams, however, was the alpha state – that twilight period in between sleep and wakefulness. In these brief periods the momentary dreams he experienced were imbued with a reality that far surpassed what he experienced in the actual dream state, and he was at these times unable to distinguish what was real and what was not. These alpha dreams were somehow more than dreams. They were more tangible, more visceral, and he emerged from them confused, as if he had stumbled into another dimension that truly existed, and which he had grasped ever so fleetingly before coming back to his own. These periods were more hallucinations than dreams, yet more palpable than reality. They frightened him as he sometimes felt he was losing his mind, and that he might never find his way back.

            To say that Tommy felt his world was unraveling would be a gross understatement. He had always fancied himself to be a rational man, a sensible man, able to decide the course of his life. He used to think of himself as being more or less in control of events that happened upon him, deftly able to find his way around the obstacles that life cast before him. However, the ship he rode upon in his dreams was beyond his control, and many were the times he felt himself dashed upon those rocky shoals of the misfortune he himself was creating, through the restless entreaties of his subconscious mind that had promised smooth sailing and compliant winds to peaceful shores.

            To which reality did he now belong, Tommy wondered. To the harsh daylight world that reminded him in a thousand different ways of what he had lost, and yet which he might somehow manage to reconcile, or to the realm of dreams that held the promise of happiness with his only child, only to be snatched invariably from his arms as the light of the rising sun slowly penetrated his eyelids. He belonged to neither place but was a captive of both. His days were met with an all too believable disbelief, and his nights were filled with phantasms of a past he could never hope to recover, with distant shores he knew after he awoke that he could never hope to reach again. Good dreams gone bad.