Usurper

I’ve always had lucid dreams. I can’t predict when they’ll come or what happens in real life to bring them on.

This dream started out as many dreams do. I was back in school, except with the knowledge and trappings of an adult. In theory this is heaven. The freedom to explore without consequence, but with the experience and riches to eat something other than instant ramen every day.

As a bonus, this school was special: only my favorite people attended.

Everyone had left for the school trip to the Poconos, which according to a map were now in Virginia. Only a few latecomers and rebels remained in studio. This was a nice studio, one that would make a Silicon Valley design team’s eyes go wide as silver dollars. It featured tiered levels of butcher block desks and big windows. Those who wanted to be near the sky could be near the sky. Those who craved the earth could descend.

I looked at a map. This was when I knew I was dreaming.

Someone told me once that if you could read, you were approaching the end of a dream. I use it as my biggest cue that I’m dreaming. The written word rarely makes sense in that realm.

My amateur theory is that reading requires a higher plane of thinking than seeing images. Letters and numbers are abstract and evoke further images. This is too much layering for a sleeping brain, an Inception style breaking of the chain. So my brain either wakes me up to do the work or I can play along and recognize the squiggly nonsense as dream language.

I stood on a snowy lawn. There was a decked out glowing Santa and a glass-walled train rattled past on the rails. The warm Christmas lights splashed the cool blue of the snow. I could feel the fog of breath on my face. Perhaps we made it to the Poconos. I didn’t get to find out. The dream transitioned. I fell out of lucidity and back into a normal dream.

My dad and I were seeing a Broadway musical. This should have been the first clue that I was in a dream, as he’d much rather go to the opera or veg with us in front of Netflix. As we sat down, Bernadette Peters came up to me with a microphone and a bag of different silly foam covers.

“Oh, good, you’re here. Here’s the script for the robot’s voice.”

She handed me three sheets of paper. I looked down and read them. Nothing was in order and there was not even any music, just a few verses and jumbled notes. Oh, this could not end well.

“Uh,” I said. But I was fascinated. And, Bernadette Peters. So I decided to stay in this dream and see what would happen. I went ahead and tested out the microphones. I was debating between a cute perky WALL-E voice or a chiller Siri when they told me to stop testing. Apparently the audience was filing in and everyone could hear me.

Ryan Gosling was the male lead. He was in all white with a Bowie-esque lightning bolt painted across his front. This was platinum blond Gos, a la Place Beyond the Pines. My first line came up. I looked at my ‘script’ (aka, dog vomit word garbage) and I could not find the line.

Dead air.

The audience started to whisper. Bernadette appeared and pulled me into the aisle. I showed her the wrinkled sheets with a gaze that shot lasers of WTF and she mimed the beat. She found the line and pointed at it and sang into the mic herself. It was gibberish, because what was written on the sheet was gibberish.

“Don’t worry, this is a hard part,” she said. “It’s so important that reporters asked me which celebrity I’d cast as the robot voice.”

We went into the hallway I pulled out the notes again. I was tensing up. Why weren’t we backstage? This was an important show. No one was going to care that Bernadette Peters hadn’t cast anyone in time and waited til the last minute like a flippant college freshman. The burden was on me and I, a Broadway noob, did not have the mustard to single-handedly save a failing show as it was running. I was fighting someone else’s fight even though I was inside of my own head. The prospect of fame and riches soured.

I was walking out to my own version of showing up to school naked.

There have been enough moments in my life where I’ve trapped myself through good will. Instead of questioning failing projects early or breaking off unhealthy relationships, I have sometimes sacrificed to preserve peace. I have followed rules and edicts because they are ‘right’ and regretted it afterwards.

“Peace out, Bern,” I said and flashed back into consciousness.

I picked up my phone and tweeted.

In my dreams I have watched cities sprout around me from nothing, flown hanging on the tails of paper airplanes, faced tigers and dodged zombies. I have also been betrayed by loved ones, ridiculed by Mean Girls and executed by serial murderers. When I am lucid, I am a usurper. I rule the most elusive realm, the only place I care to conquer. I rule my own thoughts like a badass Buddhist BAMF.

Though it’s not without doubt. If I was not lucid I might have been able to sail through my musical and touch hearts with my robotic renditions. The nonsense might have made sense to me had I not looked down and questioned its validity. Had I not tried to make myself the outsider.

This is the curse of lucidity: wondering when your experience and failures are not saving graces, but rather, motivations to flinch. I sometimes wonder if I gain anything from healthy skepticism besides saving face. I question if any of my self-loathing or quests for improvement actually help me to happiness.

But then I think of the dreams. The textures and colors and richness achieved in my more experienced awareness, details that would drift away from memory were I not such a lucid dreamer. I don’t always need to win. To see and remember is enough.