So, I dream. I don’t mean like I’m a “dreamer” and I have great ideas for a country album or building a business empire or some seemingly hair-brained theory that scholars now mock but will someday earn me a Nobel prize. I just mean I have dreams.
This morning I woke up from a dream in which I owned and worked at a renaissance-themed frozen yogurt parlor, like Medieval Times on dairy. It was your typical cheesy get-up: plastic, faux-stone walls trimmed in open crenelation, arched gothic-revival “windows” that framed murals of cartoonish jousting knights and maypole dancers, and me, a serving wench, in a hapless bliaut dress. It was the kind of place whose failing authenticity is only further saddened by it being located in a shopping mall.
While I worked my daily grind in this past-to-present juxtaposition, I had a fantastic secret. The secret was that this modern, yogurt-store life was just a cover…. It was a parallel universe for the medieval life in which I actually lived and had responsibilities. From time-to-time, I would be wandering the shopping mall, giggling at young men in Foot Locker or eyeing shoes at Bakers and then –smokepoof!- some rad wizard shows up and tells me I have to go back to the past and slay a dragon or whatever.
In this dream’s ultimate quest, I got called to rescue my real-life son from an evil witch who, for whatever reason, wanted jurisdiction over my realm and free use of my swimming pool (when life gets serious, my dreams involve swimming pools). The whole ordeal was so stressful: skillful swordplay giving rise to dramatic acts of witchcraft involving smoke and animal morphology, loads of running and horseback riding, saddle-less bare backs chaffing my crotch area. Television makes those things look so badass, but, let me tell you, there’s nothing worse than dismounting a valiant steed to reveal giant inner-thigh blisters and then having to wield a magic sword the exact weight of my own body. In this dream I was (dis-) graced with the same complete lack of coordinated skill that I have in real life, and the whole “saving mankind” thing was such an utter bother.
The dream’s details here escape me, but after somehow being triumphant over the world’s dark forces, I had to shake hands and pledge everlasting protection to those in need and gallantly dish out forgiveness to my enemies and eat a lot of potatoes and pheasant. I didn’t want to do any of those things,; I didn’t want to fight or hurt or slay or be honorable or be chivalrous or claw my way through a small dirt passage I uncover in a stonewalled prison cell to escape in the nick of time.
All I wanted to do was get back to the fantasy part of my in-dream life, where I put sprinkles on some fucking hot fudge sundaes.
What I loved about this particular dream is this reverse expectation. Instead of being the mundane part, the themed yogurt shop was the fantasy life. An onlooker might normally expect that the boring times of life were spent in a mall shop hustling soft serve to bratty children and toothless geriatrics… mindless, ice-cream-scooping hours spent in bored anticipation of exciting times scoring up feudal battles and bent-backwards kisses from hot paladins. This was not the case, however, and upon waking, I have been sitting here, writing, wondering what this could possibly mean. Why wouldn’t I want to be the celebrated, nonpareil hero of any world, especially a dream world in which consequences are so ungoverned?
In my real life, here I am: about to FINALLY graduate college, completing this quest in which I have been in a scavengerous battle for almost thirteen years. But here, at thirty-one, I still enjoy the life of a college student. Sure, I study hard and make good grades and other productive things. But I still get to live life without real borders: I don’t have a mortgage I’m barely keeping up with or multiple mouths to feed or credit card debts or minivan payments or obscene medical bills or burdensome aging parents who have to move in with me or anything else that constrains any other individual into a begrudging fight-for-your-life.
I’m just a girl, roaming, unarmed.
Over this past year, my waking life had been calm and routine and day-to-day, and then something happened. Somehow, in this real world, a set of problems emerged- there appeared a dragon!- and I am currently fighting him off. Since I am actually Allison and actually lack all sword fighting skills (both literal and metaphorical) I am doing a botched job of saving myself.
Right now, literally this day, I’m looking at the dragon of Real Life and I’m terrified. The armor of reality is heavy, the weapons are archaic, and I’m just too fucking lazy and scared to walk into this beast’s fire and slay the wretched thing.
Other people make it look so easy. Other people make me think they have rooms full of taxidermied dragon heads, and the hard-won treasure associated with the defeat. I don’t know how to live in a real world like that. I don’t know how to escape the fantasy world of eating ice cream on my couch while simultaneously watching reruns of Seinfeld. I don’t know how to exchange my dream life of mall shopping and giggling at boys and candy and swimming pools… for a real life of beasts and heroes.
The message here, I believe, is that life is manageable, pleasant even, until shit gets real. Eating cake is awesome, until your pants don’t fit. Dating is awesome, until the self-sacrifice or self-centeredness that comes with an actual relationship. Staying in school is awesome, because you get rewarded for finding answers to things that have already been answered…. you are either right or wrong in these things, but an adult life just isn’t a standard scale-grading teacher.
Expectations, if unclear, are so easily defeated. And my own expectations are consistently undefined, or redefined, if they even exist at all. I have no idea what my future looks like. I wish someone would just tell me. Or I wish I could buy a huge book that would be like a dictionary to define the true outcome of everything I could possibly find myself facing…
From time-to-time, I see overzealous, newly-married couples post sweet somethings on Facebook. After two divorces myself, I laugh at the image of “I’ll never leave you,” being whispered into a smiling ear during a first dance, then cut to seven years in the future when the embittered groom is moonlighting as a party clown to pay for a messy divorce. I thought having my son was going to be all mommy-baby, cut to twelve years of mixed struggle erupting into my current, acrimonious custody battle. My excitement for getting two puppies was focused on twice the snuggles, forgetting about twice the dogshit. Finally grasping my bachelor’s degree was supposed to propel me into the land of opportunity, not scare last night’s pizza out of my ass with more unresolved choices about my future. I thought I could handle being just friends while being more than just friends. I thought I could watch Paranormal Activity alone. I thought that people were more like me and that short shorts looked good on me and that being pitiably quirky was a virtue and that being honest was going to get easier someday.
If I had the reference book I just described, I could have looked up any of the above scenarios when faced with them and prevented the unpleasant outcomes before they ever happened.
I see myself, I pick up the book, I flip to the Appendicies and finger trail down to How to defeat a dragon. In a fervor of excitement, I flip to the correct page upon which this answer would likely be written:
“Don’t be stupid, Allison. Dragons aren’t real.”
seeallisonplay 