My Christmas Dream

My Christmas dream this year is one of hope. My dream is a dream of peace and goodwill, with a choir of angels proclaiming good tidings from the sky. In my dream, the joy of Christmas pierces all the man-made boundaries that keep us from being true brothers and sisters the rest of the year. My dream is in color, but it’s that hazy, muted, other-worldly color you only get in dreams. I don’t know. It might actually just be black and white.

My Christmas dream finds hundreds of men and women walking hand in hand, converging in a snow-covered glen where they lift up their voices as one to sing songs of praise and joy. It kind of looks like the field behind the neighborhood where I grew up, but it’s totally bigger than that. I must just remember it that way.

Faces, both familiar and strange, glow in the starlight in this wintery wonderland. My middle school math teacher is there, but it’s more like a cross between my middle school math teacher and Chloris Leachman. It’s weird how sometimes in dreams you know exactly who someone is, even if it’s not actually them. You know what I mean?

At this point in my dream, they start handing out Toll House cookies and hot chocolate. I’m excited, but just when it’s my turn in line everthing starts to get kind of dark and blurry. I reach out to take the cookies, but it’s like my perception is all off. Things that look like you could grab them are out of reach, as if they were behind some force field or something. It’s very frustrating.

I get more anxious and claustrophobic, but before long I figure out that I must be in a dream. Isn’t that the best? That rare moment when you realize you’re dreaming, but you don’t wake up? You can do anything you want, with no consequences. I immediately launch myself into the air and start flying like Neo in The Matrix. 

It’s exhilarating for a while, but because I’m now aware it’s a dream, the fabric of the imagined reality begins to tear apart. Real life floods in, and I start to remember all the mundane things I need to do, like buying stocking stuffers for my wife, and all the emails I need to answer at work before vacation begins. But before I wake up, my imagination has one more surprise for me; I fly face-first into a tree. 

My whole body convulses as I wake with a shock, which in turn rips Shereen out of her deep sleep. “What the heck was that?” she mutters. “Nothing.” 

I look over at the clock. 3:45 am. I rearrange the bedding and the pillow to accommodate the face-down sleeping position and attempt in vain to return to my Christmas dream. It’s no use. Everyone knows you can’t will yourself back into a specific dream. At this point I’ll be lucky if I get an hour of sleep between now and when the alarm goes off at 5:30. 

Eventually I do get back to sleep, and I even dream a little. It’s nothing special, just the one with the dock and the ocean and the mysterious woman.

Merry Christmas.