I like lying on my bed every morning for a
while, after I wake up. I clean my eyes and walk around naked for a while
around my room, trying to decide what to do next. And what I always do is just
lying there, watching the rood or staring at the window. Not that I’m actually
using my eyes right there, I instead imagine another world, another place. I do
that because, every single morning, I feel this is not my life. I feel my real
self is somewhere else, living through something very difficult.
It often happens that when I dream, I see this
man in one room. It’s always the same room. I can see a bridge through the
window and there are two beds, very neatly made. Everything is clean and there
are also plushies everywhere. The man that I see sitting on one of the beds,
the one nearest to the window, is not really the age one would think someone
would have if you saw all those plushies and toys and several other stuff. It
seems he’s stuck there, in that place, who knows for how long.
I stared at him for so many nights. The dream
was always the same and it would dissolve into my usual slumber after only a
few minutes. It never lasted long so I couldn’t really pick up many details.
After a while, I trained myself to be more aware of the dreams and try to really
look around. The first thing I discovered was a teddy bear and that image
stayed with me for long. Last Christmas, I even made the mistake of remembering
the bear as if it had been mine, only I never had a bear.
Oddly enough, my mother told me I almost had
one. My grandfather had plans to buy one the day I was born, in order for him
to be the first person to ever give me a gift. He wanted to have a strong
presence in my life and he had decided a bear, carefully made and wearing a red
shirt, would be the way to do it. Sadly, my grandfather had a heart attack some
days before my birth, so he never got to buy the bear and I never got to meet
him. That was the first time I had heard the story and it gave me chills.
So, of course, I kept trying to figure out the
recurring dream I had been having. But, for months, I was stuck in the same
place every time. I saw the bear and then, when I turned my head towards the
man, I instantly blacked out and then moved on to another dream. Well, to be
honest, the first few times it happened I would wake up in terror, sweating and
just too scared to go back to sleep any time soon. Those nightmares gave me
dark marks under my eyes but I countered those by choosing to jog at night
around my neighborhood, a very quiet place to think.
I would come back sweaty and tired, ready to
go to bed without any disturbance in my head or in my life. But the nuisance
was there nevertheless. The dream returned a few days after and I just managed
to handle it the best I could. I tried hard to discover anything new but it
didn’t go anywhere. So I just decided to play a layback role every time, hoping
my unconscious mind would get bored of playing the same dream over and over
again. But it didn’t. It kept insisting.
My parents entrusted me with a very large
company, the main one in their corporation. It was started many years before by
my grandparents and I just try to keep it going forward. We manage various
companies dealing with trade and that makes my job very challenging but very
fulfilling at the same time. I have been able to visit half of the world and I
have learned so many things, even more than the ones I learned back in college,
where I graduated with honors. I had always excelled.
In my family, every single person trusts me
with their lives, their secrets and their money. Every time there’s a problem
somewhere, they call me to fix it or at least to call someone else to fix it.
Since my high school days I have been connecting with various people around the
globe and I have now an enormous network of friends and family in every single
corner of the planet. Everywhere my jet lands, I have someone doing a party for
me or at least treating me to dinner.
Maybe it’s the dream, but I have found myself
thinking what would my life be like if I hadn’t let this life. I think I would
be fine. Maybe not rich but I would like to think that I would be as driven and
smart as I am right now. I even think I would be just as much as attractive
physically and socially as I am now. I have learned not to be ashamed of myself
or of my various assets. I have made efforts in my life so I think it’s ok to
let people now I’m very proud of everything I am and what I’ve done.
That man in the dream seems worried. He’s not
very well dressed and, to be honest, he looks bored to death. I cannot really
make up his face entirely. I mostly see his body, like a shape, sitting there
on the bed. It was a long time after I started having the dreams when I
realized the man was actually moving the whole time. He seems to be writing,
typing something on a laptop computer in front of him. The night I discover
that fact I woke up tremendously excited because there had finally been a
breakthrough. Whatever that was, it was going somewhere.
You may not understand this, but I need to
feel I’m always in control. I wouldn’t say I’m a control freak or something
that crazy. The thing is I like to understand everything that happens around
me, even if I’m not very familiar with whatever it might be. That’s why, when I
travel, I try to meet locals and I ask them many questions in order to better
understand their culture and their states of mind. It’s a unique way to
understand a whole country, in order to do proper business.
That’s why I cannot stand that I have the same
dream every night and I cannot see or get what’s happening. I even got to a
psychiatrist in order for him to explain what’s up with my head but he told me
it was a pretty normal thing and that, once it resolves itself, it will simply
go away as if nothing had ever happened. Normally, I would never doubt a
professional but something tells me this is something else, this is maybe
something much more powerful and convoluted than I thought.
Then, Camilla came to my apartment. She does
that frequently. Sometimes I go to her place and sometimes she comes to mine.
My family has been pushing me to ask her to marry me but I cannot seem to find
the time to do it. She’s very beautiful and entertaining, she has even heard
every single detail about my dreams and has tried to help me find a solution.
But something tells me I shouldn’t make that big step until I solve whatever is
going around my head. It feels important.
The last time she came, however, something
changed. The dream happened as always but, when I was supposed to wake up, I
finally got to see him. The man actually raised his face towards me and looked
at my eyes with his, which were sad, kind of red. Then I woke up. I was
sweating again. I got up as silently as I could, walked to the kitchen, and had
some water. I was trembling a bit and my breathing was off. I tried to calm
myself, trying to remind my mind it had been just a dream.
I just realized the man I had been seeing in
my dreams, for so long, was me. Those eyes were mine, that face was mine. Every
detail was a copy of my real self. He looked sad, despaired and hopeless. I
felt all of that inside me and I guess that’s what made me shake so much.
However, what scared me the most was the fact
that I got to see, through his eyes, what he was doing on the laptop. It
happens he was writing. It was a short story and it was how, every so often, he
had a dream about being someone else, having a much better life than the one he
had.
