The Dream

When I was a very young child, I had a recurring dream in which I'd see a dime on the floor of my bedroom. I would jump out of bed in order to retrieve it, but just as I reached for the shiny thing, it would disappear. Every time I had the dream (and I had it often) I would wake feeling even more cheated and disappointed, not to mention exhausted. Sometimes I had the dream several times in a single night!

On one such occasion, I decided that when the dream came again, I wouldn't reach for the coin. Maybe I was making it disappear because I wanted it too much. If the money was real, I reasoned, it would still be there in the morning.

Sure enough, the dream came and I wanted to grab the dime, but I resisted and slept through till morning. I was disappointed to find no money on the floor, but glad that I never had the dream again.

I could call this a success story, in that I stopped agonizing and losing sleep over false hope, that I used logic to outsmart emotion, but I was sad just the same. Thinking back I wonder: if I had so much power to manipulate my actions inside a dream, then why didn't I choose, instead, to manipulate the dream itself? Why didn't I make the dime stick? Or make it so that when I reached for it, instead of dissolving into thin air, it turned into a dollar bill?

These questions come to me as I stare into the sour, murky, foul-tasting twenty-herb teas I'm drinking so eagerly morning and night in an effort to improve my reproductive health. I ask myself now, as I attempt to balance hope against sober statistics and the possibility of further disappointment, why not dream instead of dreams come true? Or of reaching for something elusive and finding my grasp close around a reality even better than I originally hoped for?

Happy Holidays...