The nightmares that I find most distressing are usually not so spectacular in nature. They usually don't involve falling from great heights, or explosions, or wild animals, or serial killers. Nothing of the sort. I think I have never feared such things to any great degree, not really as deep as to have them emerge in the form of dreams. Instead, it is the dreams where I am given some task and I fail (or begin to fail) at it that most disconcert me. For this type of sensation, that of failure, I have had intimate relations with. Several times, especially before returning to college for the last year and a half, after my five-year-long break, I had dreams that I was taking some classes, and found myself forgetting to do the work for one or more of them, forgetting that I had had those classes at all. Then I have woken up, relieved that it wasn't real. I have even had this dream long after successfully graduating: this paradigm is situated that deep.
Just recently, I had a dream where I was given a list of tasks to do, and then, and I'm not sure how it happened, I was given an account of them, that I had been at a lapse in all that I was to have done. When I awoke, I remember being not so relieved at all, for I truly had been at a loss at all these tasks — for all of them turned out to be impossible — and there was no comfort to be had except that I forget it all. I did find this dream a little strange, as since my conversion in 1998, I have not failed at any sort of employment I have been involved with. But the creep of my past — perhaps there is no escape from some of my sins. In dreams, I have died, but death will come to us all, and it is of no shame that we succumb to it. I could not bear, though, to have been given life, and given all the chances to make of it something, not to have done anything. That is fear. To have sat through life, as life slipped by, letting all our fire blink out.
anonymous
3:49pm wednesday, 2nd june
Makes sense to me. That nagging sense of missing it doesn't fail to find me but I'm learning to recognize it at the door and make the decision not to answer anymore. Though powerful is the pull. Not worth the time it takes to plummet down the spiral staircase all at once just to be paralyzed there for however long that sting silences me stone dead waiting for recovery... So I'm learning.
anonymous