Is Life a Dream?

Thought for the Week: The Upside-Down Logic of Dreams

There’s a sort of “dream logic” by which most people live their lives, as though what they can see is all there is. But what we perceive, science tells us, is only a construct, an interpretation of what actually is. Still, we go on, living in Plato’s Cave, mistaking shadows for reality and living for those shadows. I had a dream that left me wondering, Is my waking life any more real than my dreams? Unable to express so insensible a thought in sensible language, I express it here in free verse:

I dreamed I’d flown to London.

I was about to call my wife to tell her,

“Honey, we’ve landed safely,”

when the alarm went off.

My first thought was,

I’ll leave her a message,

but there was no time before I awoke.

So I said as I opened my eyes

there in bed beside my wife,

“Darling, I’m in London.”

The upside-down logic of dreams

makes preposterous sense to us

because we live in a middling place, you and I,

in the land of Neverwas,

between Death and Life,

between dreaming and waking,

as though Neverwas was Evermore.

We plan our present while we drop,

ignoring the ocean in which we’re about to plop.

Neverwas is crowded and cruel,

but speckled with motes of Beauty.

So we resolutely acknowledge those specs

as all the good there is,

then fight to own them

and control them

even as they vanish.

For the motes are merely flecks

of a limitless Beauty

that belongs to Someone else.

Soon now

we’ll splash down into that infinite ocean

and find ourselves on the shores of Evermore.

And if we’ve lived only

by the upside-down logic of dreams,

we won’t know how to walk inland

to the right-side-up reality of Evermore,

nor will we even want to.

Our hearts will stay bound to Neverwas.

And all that will remain of us

will be the sense of Death,

the thing upon which we fed.

And it will be too late to learn

the sense of Life.

∞