Illustration by Gisela Levy
I just opened my purse to clean out the pockets and I found a slip of paper that said “LIFE COULD BE A DREAM.” I know I must have left it for myself to find, but artificially created mysteries are just as healthy as non-GMO ones.
If you know me, you know I love dreaming, and I’ve probably told you about the dream I had last night. My favorite things about dreams are: 1. They predict the future. 2. They recycle the past. 3. That means they are about all time, at once. 4. I don’t mean to make this sound too grand. 5. They are also funny.
What do I mean they predict the future? I mean that earlier this week I had a dream where I went to a three-story authentic patisserie on Fifth Ave, overfilled a paper bag with fifteen pastries and walked out of the store without paying. When I’d realized what I’d done, I got stressed about stealing and went back to wait in line and pay, but I was so anxious that I ate all the pastries. When I got to the counter, I had nothing to pay for and was ushered out with a free sample. Today, I’ve eaten three chocolate croissants.
What do I mean they recycle the past? I mean that earlier this month I had a dream where I was in an airport bathroom coming back from China, and Bill Clinton was leaning against the wall smoking a cigarette, Hillary Clinton was looking at me in the mirror, aggressively judgmental, and Madeline Albright wanted my help making instant ramen.
That means dreams are about all time, at once. Every dream I’ve had is a real life, and when that Gisela falls asleep after her crazy trip to the patisserie or when she gets back from the airport, she dreams she’s writing a blog post for a literary magazine. Sometimes we dream our own futures too, and when you walk into a building for the first time and feel the light breaking in from the tall western windows, how the glow warms your shoulders, and you intuit where the stairs are, you know that you’ve been there before. Try to wrap your head around that.
I don’t think I gain anything from believing this. It doesn’t give the universe a higher order or power, and I think it might encourage chaos. But it’s so easy to. It’s just a choice, with immediate results, and it’s free. It makes life whimsical, it makes sleep exhilarating, it makes waking up an opportunity to remember. It means I always have a story to tell. And it costs me nothing to believe. Making this choice reminds me that I still have space in the world, uncontested and indefinable space, in which to assert my preferences and intuitions and creations and fears and well, my dreams. There are still some choices which are free.
But dreams are also funny. I had this dream once where I was cornered by the secret agents of my political rivals, terrifying men in suits, ready to kill, except when you looked right at them you could see what they actually were. Three-foot-wide beef meatballs, hunky, chunky, threatening, and still in sunglasses.
Gisela Levy is an Art and Design editor, and a junior EALAC major. She enjoys lying supine and thinking beautiful thoughts. Sometimes she shares them.