Quick Break
When I was younger, like really young I couldn’t tell the difference from what was real to when I was dreaming.
Seriously.
What made it worse was that I had to learn about death at a really early age because my grandma died when I was five. So of course me being a curious child I couldn’t stop thinking about the one question that no adult could really answer “where do we go?”
Actual act of death flooded my thoughts, I would have dreams about kids that I knew. They would die, and the principal would announce it over the loud speaker, and say they would be buried at the school’s grave yard.
When I went to school the next day they would be gone. No one would be upset, so I’d shrug and crack open my math books. In reality they probably moved or transferred to catholic school.
When I told my mom about that, she gave me an odd look and said I had an imagination.
Sometimes I would play in the dirt (like all little boys are prone to do), after I washed up and sat at the dining room table I would see worms and bugs crawling in and out of my skin.
There was this one time in kindergarten I remember waking up one morning really early, mom and dad were asleep, and I felt like the world was different. It felt like instead of sleeping for eight hours or so, it was really for years. I referred to it as the “Big Sleep” when I thought about it for a long time after.
I’m thinking about this now, because I’m really wondering if it still happens and I stopped noticing. How much did I go through and do and was real. Am I typing this out in a dream in a mental home? Did I really date some mexican girl named Joanna once and she disappeared, or did she just never exist? Did I really pet a kangaroo in the sydney zoo, or was I just in a toys ‘r’ us? Did I make up every single person I ever knew? Am I really working with video games in a lofty office in SOHO, or am I still in C3i and my brain made up something instead so I can deal with it?
Are you real? No wait don’t answer that.
