The first dream that I remember, I must have been around 10 give or take a year or two, and it takes place in Dodge back when we were renting a place, and I was around the corner sleeping over at a girlfriends’ place. Most of the details of it are gone, but this image remains of me, or something like me, out the window, I am looking out her window and my ear has been cut off, somehow, and I can remember the image out that bedroom window still, vividly, and its for some reason stayed with me. Just that tiny smidge of it remains, that Van Goghesque detail, of the ear being gone, and I don’t know why, but there are only a handful of dreams that have stayed, certainly, but that one was the very first to remain, that has, em, haunted is not the right sense, but something akin to. 

Dreams are something I don’t often remember, rarely remember, actually, and so when I do I pay attention. I don’t dream easily, don’t fantasize often about things, places, dreams of wanting more are difficult for me, I struggle with them, I am fearful of them. Dreaming can lead to disappointment, of which I am all too familiar, and over the years I’ve shied away from dreaming, been embarrassed almost at my dreams, being laughed at for my dreams, all pie in the sky and dewy-eyed. 

“Hope is a waking dream.” 

Aristotle

Across from me on the wall, here in the kitchen nook, is a print of a painting of two Adirondack chairs on a grassy oceanside, by an artist named Diane L. Romanello, overlooking what I guess is a sunset, but that I now imagine a sunrise, as I sit here in my rattan chair looking east.

I found it at a garage sale a few years back, and I guess it was this zen calm that it gives, and so when I saw it leaning against the table in the driveway,  yeah, I had to buy it, it drew me in and I knew I must pay the $2 (or whatever it was) and home it came, which at the time was Irish Lake, a small lake just 40 minutes south of Georgian Bay. 

“Yes: I am a dreamer. For a dreamer is one who can only find his way by moonlight, and his punishment is that he sees the dawn before the rest of the world.” 

Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist

Often I sit here and gaze ‘out’, as if it were,  towards this faux window paradise at a view I may never have, but who knows, eh? 

I’ve lived here now a little over 5 years and I’ve never known exactly where to put it. And so, it has travelled to each wall, and finally, it rests on the opposite wall from where I spend most of my time and is a perfect inspiration, a reset, a step back. 

“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” 

Edgar Allan Poe

Sometimes its a much-needed respite from a long day at work, or just when my internet has gone out for the billionth time in the last week and I’m about to pitch a fit cause I was in the middle of writing something, watching something, doing SOMETHING, and the frustration overwhelms so I gaze ‘out’ and find my happy place rather then needlessly bashing the shite out of my poor little Chromebook that doesn’t know any better, and sometimes I can even almost hear the sound of the waves lapping the sandy shore, I can just smell the salty sea air, and for a brief time I by the sea, feeling the gentle breeze brush my cheek. 

I used to have this grand picture I’ve had for eons of the old-fashioned Southern Magnolia’s on that same wall, but that now hangs in the other room, cause when I was re-arranging everything a few weeks back I kept gazing at the image of the chairs, the ocean, the colour of the sky, until I finally gave in and switched the two.

I’m allowing myself this dream. Damnit, yes, why not? So, here I am now with a wonderful view, a gentle mythic breeze swirls, as I sometimes sit here and gaze not at the stark leafless Walnut Tree through my actual window, but instead to a place out of my deepest desires, a place I have never been, but have always been, living by that sea. 

“Hold fast to dreams,
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird,
That cannot fly.” 

Langston Hughes

That image reminds me of so many things, such as the moment we arrived at our hotel at the Outerbanks of North Carolina so many years ago, Mom and Dad and my ex-husband, and mom had set down her bags as we all stood in awe at the view out the window, of pure ocean and sky, and she declared right then and there, “we are staying another day, Jeff phone the front desk“. 

It reminds me of Cape Cod in Massachusetts and those grassy protected shores, it reminds me of an old St. Petersburg Florida that barely now exists I first saw in my teens, and frankly I don’t know how much else I would do but gaze out and watch the world flow by, so it’s probably just as well it is only a dream. 

“People think dreams aren’t real just because they aren’t made of matter, of particles. Dreams are real. But they are made of viewpoints, of images, of memories and puns and lost hopes.” 

Neil Gaiman

Everything outside, in the real world, is stark and cold, and so I dream, allow myself now, of things that may never be.

No longer do I hide them away, or I try not to. That place I desire, the things I may want, rather than settling for all the things I have, which are a blessing, yet still, I have learned to allow for dreams,  right out loud in the open dreams, where everyone can see my failure or my success. 

For so long I have reserved myself to practical things, here and now things, to matters at hand that were in reach, allowing myself no disappointments, no heartaches and missed or lost hopes, and dreams slowly disappeared. Those dreams once set off to the side, tossed away in the closet, hidden away from view, I display before me, to remind myself, to be inspired, to smile and imagine, and, perchance to dream myself, again. 

“I dream my painting and I paint my dream.” 

Vincent Willem van Gogh