Slip Into a Former Dreamland

Slip Into a Former Dreamland
Photo by Sergey Shmidt / Unsplash

I woke up this morning in a new place and found myself looking out the window into a new city and wondering how I arrived here. It was nine months ago that I died and it is somehow appropriate that it is now, nine months later, that I am born again. All of those past impossibilities that seemed so distant have found their way back into my life. The scale is much smaller, more manageable, and I wonder whether any sort of greatness lay ahead. I would not want to use my past as an excuse for my future.

Where else will my dreams lead me? A new dream? An old dream? I wouldn’t be very happy given a second chance to just slip into a former dreamland where all life is as it was – all future impossibly dark and distant. Ambivalence, like a heavy fog, is lifting and revealing a more mundane world where the saturation is turned down, the hues are not as bright, the octaves not so high, and the flowers smell not as sweet. If this is the price of freedom then I think I’ll pay it. I am only now realizing that those late night scribbling fits – when I would rant until dawn – are left to my imagination. I can only half wish for that sort of manic insight that can only come from an amped up brain.

Perhaps the hues were never that bright; maybe the flowers were never so sweet. Perhaps it was only imagination that created that reality. Whatever it was I wish I had more of it … but it is not to be.