The dream of a boy of five, interrupted by the opening of a pair of eyes, not his eyes. These ones are within him, somewhere else, so it seems then.
He wakes up, opens his own eyes, and asks “Mom, how do we know that we’re not just part of someone else’s dream and that, when they wake up, we’ll disappear?”
She smiles and hugs him and, years later, remembers that moment and that question quite differently.
But this is how he remembers it. The question. The moment. Right after the moment when,with a raising of eyelids, he wiped away the dreamer within who, only an instant earlier, had wiped out some other dreamer, unknown and unmissed and so, less real–or perhaps moreso.
If the one that dreams me wakes up, where do I go? Do I die? Am I a “no longer” and “never was”?
How far back do we dreamers go? How deep?
Back and back and on and on, deeper and deeper: an infinite regress whose trail fades into tracelessness.
But perhaps that which becomes traceless can still be recovered. Rediscovered. Renewed.
And the dreamer–and the dream–we no longer see does not necessarily cease to exist.
Maybe that goes for all dreamers and all dreams, not just this one.
If the one that dreams me wakes up, do I cease to be? Or do I become, that one?
[...] a couple decades younger and five years old and a thousand miles away. A midwestern house in the afternoon, dust dappled sun rays coming [...]