26

I dream I’m reading.

It’s not like when I’m dreaming I’m running. I know where that comes from – the accident that deprived me of the ability to run.

As a kid, I could just about outrun everybody – not in terms of speed (although I was quickish), but endurance. I could run and run and run, could push through fatigue, and feel like nothing could stop me. Driving me harder, further, and sometimes faster, was my stubbornness.

When I was just eighteen or nineteen, sometimes I’d break into a sprint, like anxiety was a fuel I needed to burn off before it incinerated me.

In sport, I was always good, and enjoyed the physical element – the combativeness, the competitiveness, and the need to always find a way to push boundaries.

Once I’d lost the ability to run, reality redefined around me.

Somebody once asked me, “But you don’t run much, do you?” But you do. Like one time I got to the station late and I couldn’t sprint to catch the arriving train. Or going to movies with friends when a storm unloaded a downpour, and I could do nothing but walk through it until we got to shelter.

And I wanted to run. I wanted to feel that velocity again. So it’s unsurprising  that need wells up somewhere in the back of my mind, that it festers in my subconscious, and that it manifests as this recurring running dream.

But the reading dream has always been there, and I don’t know why. I read regularly. I write regularly. I’m not being deprived.

There’s no yearning in this dream either, no lament for something that’s missing from my life.

In the dream I know it’s a book I’m reading – it sits on a pedestal, and there’s a light shining on it. Even as I read the words, I struggle to latch onto them, like they’re slipping from my memory the moment before I can record them.

Yet some element of understanding remains, a wisp of smoke before it thins, then evaporates.

I know it’s something important, that it’s something I need to learn, and I’m frustrated that I can’t hold onto this discovery, because somebody is trying to tell me something and this is the only place that I can learn it.

What I realize only in retrospect, in writing this, is that this dream of trying to read takes place in the same location as the dream where I run, but it existed before the running dream originated.

I don’t know where this place is – somewhere boundless and empty. This place is built for just me, although in these dreams I don’t examine it.

I’m in a valley. I know that much. And there are mountains around me, tan and gold and glowing with a soft luminescence, like they’re bathed in evening sunset.

But brighter than anything is a beam that shines down on the book.

These details don’t reveal to themselves in the dream, but only through prodding recollection, whatever niche of my mind has stored these details surrendering them piecemeal, but never fully – never in a way that I’ll find a full picture.

It’s in that picture I’ll understand the book, I’ll understand what I’m reading, and I’ll understand the message.

For now, though, all that exists is the knowledge that I’m having this dream again.