I really feel like I am living in a dream. When I think of my life three years ago, having just started to study Japanese in Sweden, wanting to be able to better communicate with my nieces.… Meeting all the little kids in my family had become my source of joy those days, and I was still clinging to the hope of being able to have a family myself as well. So three years ago today, I was joining a movie night with my Japanese class at the university in Sweden, watching a Japanese zombie movie. Three years later I am living in a dream instead.
It is amazing how life can change. My life three years ago seems like a lifetime away. And my life a few weeks ago seems more distant than that zombie movie evening. The days when I was waving goodbye to my wife from the balcony in the morning is a faint whisper of a memory – all there is now is a complete focus on trying to get my wife a seat on the train. Carrying her bag. Protecting her from rude people on the train. Realizing how sillily overprotecting I am. And feeling how happy it makes me that my wife likes that part of me.
Does she like it because she loves me, or does she love me because of it? Did we get married because of the dream, that we both had been carrying, of having a family? Or was our marriage the start of living that dream? Does it matter which?
That is the issue with dreams – trying to understand them rationally is rarely fruitful. Trying to make sense of them with a chronological way of thinking leaves too much unaccounted for. And when trying to understand them in a subconsciously intuitive way, and at the same time using the mathematical brain to plan for logistically smooth days of being bodyguard to my wife on her morning and evening commutes, using the sun for laundry, preparing for dinner and fitting with the grocery store’s opening hours, the concept of dreams and their meaning becomes an internal struggle that seems to blur their clarity and at the same time remove some of their shimmering aura of magic.
So sometimes I feel dreams are best left undisturbed as a beautiful image that, when having days like this, I can enter into and walk around in, feeling like life is more magic than imagined, not worrying if I am sleeping or awake. Even after stepping out of such a dream, I will carry that sense of wonder and happiness with me the rest of that day. And hopefully, when night comes, when the cold darkness of winter arrives, there will be a warm body close to me, and a new beautiful dream waiting to carry me to the morning.
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