Ninjas and Ball Gowns and Fiji

I dream a lot.

I dream of swimming with talking piranhas who don’t feel like I’m a good enough snack to even bother. Then I get hauled into a boat by a net and I wonder if I am really a trout. I dream of pulling tapeworms out of a hole in my left nipple. I dream of shopping at Walmart in a beautiful ball gown with a huge emerald necklace.

I guess that seats itself at the top of questions humans wrestle with. What is the purpose of life? Are there aliens? If there are aliens, are they mean or nice? How am I gonna die? When am I gonna die? Why am I wearing a ball gown at Walmart?

And then the house-heater goes out and you lay in bed all snuggled up in down blankets and pajama-ramas and blast your tiny desk heater on your nightstand and hope you can get the bedroom over 60 degrees while you nurse that damned sinus infection. And you think about your dreams.

The scary ones you can’t shake from your head even though its daylight now. The ones where you are running from something terrible and you’re on the streets of Chicago and you pass three dumpsters in an alley. You turn to see if the mystery thing is still chasing you, and a low lying branch on a tree whacks you on the head and it throws you to the ground. You’re sure the whatever-it-is will catch you and you’re gonna die. Blood runs down your face and into your eye and you can’t see. Or that repetitive dream where you get shot twenty-three times and suddenly you’re a ghost looking down at a newspaper that headlines your death. When you wake up sweating and your pulse is 128 and you can’t figure out where you are.

But there are good ones, too, right? The ones where you can jump really far like Wonder Woman and there are tiny islands all over the place, so you can just jump from one to another. The ones where there are so many fireflies in the black forest, they collectively light the path leading you to the banks of the gurgling, clear stream where your father’s ashes were so lovingly placed. The ones where you and your partner are ninjas all dressed in black with awesome swords and you rob a diamond store and you high five each other and then you go to Fiji.

The dreams where you are curled up with wolves to stay warm, and when you wake up you realize your dog is snuggling you and you think ‘well, six-one-way, half-a-dozen the other’.

Maybe dreams tell the future? Maybe they are molded by the past? Maybe they’re because you watched a movie or read a news article about something and your brain smooshed it around until it felt like a new concept?

Maybe it’s all of these things. Maybe scary things and good things happened once-upon-a-time, and dreams are the guarantee that they will happen still.

Maybe they’re mapping the best course of action for your life.

So maybe I should be a ninja, buy a ball gown, and go to Fiji.