I miss my dreams. I mean, I’m sure I still dream — I haven’t gone insane yet, I think — but I miss dreaming like I did as a child. I miss waking up, confused as to whether what I just experienced was real or not, and then laying there dwelling on the dreams until they were ingrained within my mind as slightly faded memories.
Where else could I captain the USS Enterprise, mounting a defense against alien attackers while still in spacedock? Leading a skeleton crew in hand-to-hand and phaser combat on the outside hull of the ship while wearing clunky space suits is one of my best memories from my teenage years.
Another time, I was faced with my first friend, Laura, moving away to an all-girl school. I was devastated, and as a going-away present, she filled my grandparents’ yard with tables full of pictures our parents had taken of she & me. In reality, I don’t think there are any pictures of us, though I do still have most of her grade school annual pictures, and while she didn’t go off to an all-girl school, we both grew up and well, life happens. But that dream amplified the early memories of all the times we’d play together.
Around the same time as that, I had a get-together of a half dozen or so friends at my house. It was all fun and games, but we were attacked by an evil man who controlled an evil monster. Think Zuul from Ghostbusters, and you’ll have a monster of similar appearance. Fortunately, in the house was a room which had a very secure door which we used as a safe room, and strangely enough, this room was free from the effects of gravity. Unfortunately, we didn’t stay in that room, and one by one, I saw my friends taken by the beast until I was all that remained. I hid, cornered at the end of the house, under a bed. I watched as the man and his beast entered the room, but the memory ends when I came face to face with the monster.
Perhaps the most interesting, or at least the most ridiculously entertaining, memory was the time I was in attendance for a professional wrestling event, the main event of which pitted the incomparable Hulk Hogan against the sadistic Pinhead. Mere seconds after the match began, and while Hogan was still doing his usual showboating, Pinhead summoned a screw from the nether which very quickly impaled the Hulkster. Did I mention that all of this was being held in a junkyard for some reason?
Awesome. Sentimental. Terrifying. Bizarre. Dreams are all of those, and I miss mine.