Dreams

Courtesy of Sleep Cycle

They say everyone dreams.

My dad swore that he never dreamed. I told him he just didn’t remember his dreams. He said that no, that wasn’t it. He didn’t dream.

I sometimes thought that he felt that dreaming was a weakness of some sort.

Dad was definitely a man of the 1950s. He was tough on us. He demanded perfection from us and from himself. Maybe for him, dreaming was an imperfection of some sort. I’ll never know.

I do know this. When he was dying from cancer and my mom and sister were out of the house, it fell to me to look after him. I’d sit in their master bedroom and wait for him to need something from me. Mostly he slept. I would sometimes watch him sleep and saw him slide into rapid eye movement sleep. REM.

REM is when you dream. Or so I’ve read.

Some dreams are not all that memorable. Some dreams you’d like to forget. I also often wondered if Dad’s dreams were so unsettling to him that he wished to forget them and so he did.

I don’t remember all of my dreams. The unsettling and sometimes horrifying dreams seem to be the hardest for me to forget. So maybe that wasn’t it for my dad. Maybe he just couldn’t admit to dreaming because then we might ask what he dreamt.

Then there are the hyper-real dreams. Dreams so vivid that I feel I must be awake. But also so odd that I couldn’t possibly be experiencing that for real.

Those are burned into my psyche. I couldn’t forget them if I tried.

I’ve written up a few of them as short stories. I’ve had a couple recently that I will most likely write up some day.

They say it is essential to our health and well-being that we dream.

Sometimes I wonder just how true that is.

Courtesy of Gracious Quotes. Sometimes it certainly feels that way.