A Robotic Dream is a Spicy Thing to Taste

A Recollection of last night:

Feeling somewhat sick and exhausted from a weekend of self-inflicted abuse, I had decided to retire early and watch The Science of Sleep as I myself drifted to sleep. If you have seen this movie, you know (besides the fact that Michel Gondry is a creative genius) that the main character is a person who cannot easily draw the line between wakefulness and sleep, a trait that causes him great pains in pursuing true love. Basically the whole movie drifts freely between dream and waking consciousness and a line cannot easily be found dividing the two states.

So it was with this movie playing that I drifted off to sleep, as I said above. The dreams I had that night seemed to flow seamlessly into one another, and as is nearly always the case, I have no hope of recording or even remembering all of the in their entirety. What I do remember is a hillside.

It may more deftly be described as a mountainside due to the sheer size of it, but it is on its most basic level a big steeply sloped area of land. It is a recurring setting in my dreams, though many different dream locations have been plastered onto it, from Querétaro, México to the ruggedness of Yosemite (Half Dome in particular). There is always either a river or some other border at the foot of the slope that separates two different lands, two nations perhaps.

Last night the Mountainside was forested and rocky. We were all there (although I may not remember each of you individually, it is only right that you would all be there). We were wandering the land much like we would wander the Painted Desert, Fossil Creek or any other such absurd place. Our home was the land and we were its thoughtful custodians. Each of us hovered just above the ground and were incredibly powerful, and each had a handheld electronic device that connected us to each other. I guess it was kind of like an iphone or a blackberry of sorts. It was no run-of-the-mill device, for, you see, these possessed some sort of supernatural power. They bound each of us together. We were truly happy.

At some point, though, my happiness was put in check by my supernatural iphone. Much as Stephan in The Science of Sleep, my idealized vision of my reality was broken. The girl I loved left a message on my voicemail, and I was elated. My love was requited! And then I realized it was all a mistake. The message was not for me; rather it was for a close friend of mine. She had the wrong number.

Not to end on such a sad note, somehow things recovered. I lost the child-like innocence that I had begun with and perhaps so had all of us. Happy we were though, and we still levitated just above the ground and floated along with our supernatural iphones and blackberries. We were together on that forested, rocky mountainside. I do not recall if we ever traveled to the bottom of the slope and crossed the boundary into the unknown, but it seems only fitting that we would have.

In dreams we can tap our undiscovered power. Everything that resides in the shadows of our minds, in the realm of the impossible, can be brought to light in our dream experiences and amended to our awakened selves. I mean, how were we all levitating? Was it the supernatural handheld electronic devices? Perchance even those are a part of us. Please enlighten…