The comfort of a dream

In times when we feel like we are in the wrong place or that we want to be somewhere else, we look for an escape. Something that can take us away from the problems of our reality and into a world that didn’t have anything that brought us worries. A place that never made us uncomfortable, a place where we did not have to face any discrimination or unjust behaviour. Sounds like a dream doesn’t it? Maybe it is? Perhaps it is something we can actually feel. We would never know unless we tried.

That was not the case for Liam though. He had found a way to leave everything behind any time he wanted. Go into a world where everything was perfect for him. A world where he was not making any mistakes. A world where everybody was nice to him, and no one disrespected him at all. A world where he was admired by everyone. A world where he never felt out of place or lost his social battery. The world of a dream.

How did he do this? I asked myself constantly as I thought about him. Where was he getting the means to live like this, in terms of material or even emotional. That’s when I realised that he had actually built this life for himself. Or was he living in his dreams? I don’t know. But what he told me was quite surprising. Liam would think about where he wanted to be in every situation and if he was in the location that he wanted to be he would stay and if he was not he would leave. So slowly he started only staying in places that he wanted to be in. That’s what slowly became into his life.

Yet he does not see it as perfectly as we do. What we see is a man that is happy everywhere he goes. Yet he is a man that must return to his thoughts due to his dissatisfaction with real life. How could this be? Everything he ever dreamed of became a reality, what more could he want? What was the problem?

The comfort of a dream, the fact that the thought or dream we had would leave as soon as we woke, and we would not live in a world that was simply just made up in our own heads. Liam could not do that. His entire life was built around his dreams, such that his dreams began taking over real life. Slowly becoming an inescapable reality. Wake up every morning to continue the dream instead of going back to sleep for it. That’s the dream is it not? Not exactly.

Every time he dreamt; he couldn’t disassociate it with the natural world not only did this make him incredibly conscious of what he dreamt of. Whether it agreed with those around them, whether he would want that in real life. hence the exact thing that made him relax, in his dreams was gone. The comfort was gone. Every single thought of his was constricted to his reality. Making his dreams worthless.

An overused escape became a part of the same road.