Trying to Stay Asleep

I’ve never shared this with anyone, but when I was very young I had some strange, intense, and oddly complicated dreams. I still remember most of them, but one from when I was 4 stands out as by far the most trippy.

It started with me “waking up” in a different universe. Everyone around me was an alien, like nothing I’d ever seen before. They were spongy blobs in pyramid shape, purplish-green with one large eye centered below a smaller eye.

It took me a bit to realize I was one of those aliens, too, and that I could understand their oop-oop language. I was scared of them, particularly the two who kept telling me they were my parents.

Eventually they explained that I was one of them, a little kid, and that I was groggy from waking up from a hibernation sleep. They said that everything in our world was just part of my dream, that the Earth had never really existed. I started crying because I wanted to go back to my family.

Eventually, my alien mom took pity on me and told me I could sleep again and try to go back to this dreamworld. But she told me sternly that the next time I woke up, I’d have to shake it off, forget everything, and be part of their world.

I went back to sleep and … returned to our universe.

When I got up the next morning, I was somewhat convinced that it was real, that I’d stumbled onto the truth somehow. I don’t want to admit how long I at least partially believed this whole thing might have been real. I never told anyone, of course, because worst-case scenario was that they’d think I was crazy and start worrying about my mental health, while best-case had them believing me and being sad when they realized that you all only exist in my imagination.

I was one weird kid.

Part of this has always stuck with me, however. Throughout my life, whenever I’ve pictured going to Heaven, I always imagine every new arrival saying exactly what I said when I ‘woke up’ into that dream:

“Dang it, not now! I was just getting to the good part!”