Southbound dreams

Last night a friend told me about a dream he had.

It was a convoluted dream with many twists and turns, and there's nothing out of the ordinary if you look at it from the dreamer's point of view. From a wakeful point of view, however, it was entirely weird. One of the highly entertaining parts of his dream involved Jesus driving a silver Chevrolet sedan with a decal that said "Do it." We laughed ourselves silly trying to decipher his dream, and we came up with a few good logical-sounding interpretations. They sound logical to us, at least, since we know about this friend's life situation, his goals and aspirations. But if we tell other people about our hypotheses, they'd think we were cuckoo.

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Summer has arrived here in the Philippines. That means muggy afternoons, when taking a cool shower helps only marginally since you start feeling hot again even as you towel off. Warm afternoons, like the one I had today, make me want to take a nap (come to think of it, so do rainy and cold afternoons; I guess naptime for me is non-climate-dependent). So I took a nap.

And had a dream.

I was walking along a beach with another dear friend. Nothing unusual in that, my country has a gazillion beaches. What was unusual was that the waves weren't dashing up onto sand from the ocean. No, the sea foam rushed up to dissolve on snow. I was scrunching snow in between my toes, instead of sand. Let me tell you, I've never known snow, never had a 3-D experience with it. I know I could probably approximate it with the frosty gunk that accumulates in some old-fashioned fridges, but it isn't the same. Snow is as alien to me as cunnilingus is to my friend who had the Jesus-driving-a-car dream (he's gay). Sure, I know about snow (the way he knows about cunny) - from reading about it or seeing it on TV or in the movies. But I have no first-person experience with snow (just like he doesn't have any personal experiences with pleasing a female orally). One of the differences between us is that I'd like to get to know snow up close and personal; he doesn't have the same sentiment about the female anatomy.

Anyway.

What struck me after waking up was how normal it felt, that feeling of walking-on-the-beach-in-the-snow thing in dreamworld. Never mind that it wasn't real - inasmuch as how we define reality anyway. In that moment, in that world in my subconscious, everything felt real. More than that, it felt right.

Would that this feeling of rightness is always present in the real world, our world of wakefulness, where shit happens - stuff that's out of our control. Reality sucks sometimes. My gay friend may never see Jesus navigating the streets of Manila in a Chevrolet sedan during rush hour. I may never experience making snowcastles on a beach. But as long as we have those feelings of normalcy (even about the outrageous) inside us - and have people close to our hearts to whom we can bare our souls, who will listen, who we can be ourselves with, no holds barred, who somehow help us transcend the colorlessness of many aspects of everyday life, with whom we can cry and laugh at all the doodoo that befalls us - then I have no complaints. Not too much, anyway.