8. Dreams

Last night, I dreamed about Darfur.

In the dream, I told someone "I don't know what it would be like to live in Darfur." And suddenly I was there, and the unbearable tension of living in silence and terror of imminent violence was quite a shock. There were snipers, and we were frozen, waiting for them to shoot. Then one of them was captured, and a good person had the opportunity to harm him. "I could cut off his hand," he thought. "I could stop him from killing again." But just like in the movies, the burden of the moral dilemma was relieved entirely as the bad guy got killed fair-and-square while trying to escape.

Violence figures predominantly in my dreams. It is like the black-and-white photographic inverse of my life, a life varying in sanguine shades from rather mundane pleasantries to rollicking jovialities, pleasures like tonight's birthday celebration in the home of lovely friends and their family members. My real life is cake and ice cream and sunshine, which apparently encourages my subconscious to cook up a variety of stressful, bizarre, and occasionally gruesome nighttime entertainments in counterpoint. These dreams almost never bother me, though. I can't recall the last time I actually woke up frightened, or failed to manage to get up in the morning and shrug it off and drink some coffee. Often, too, I suppose, they aren't nearly as gory or traumatic as last night's episode, but just wildly quixotic escapades of mind and matter. We all dream of flying, I know, or forgetting to wear pants to school or missing our final exams. But the things I dream of just make me shake my head.

I am thankful for my daily life of flowers, for rainbows, for the tranquil daydreams that are my real life.

I don't know what it would be like to live in Darfur.