Always remember that this is a dream. You are asleep with your head on the scorching, cereal-crusted backseat of your father’s car, the old one that requires a push to start in the morning. This is certainly not the new car across the country; you imagined it. Naturally, even though you are four years old, your subconscious is capable of picturing a Subaru Outback in perfect detail, just as it can exactly reconstruct the Pacific Ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge. Nothing is real and you are at home.
You realized you were dreaming one day in first grade. The Kapla blocks kept slipping through your fingers at recess. Reality flickered like a dying campfire. Your parents take you to the eye doctor, but you know you dreamed the move; you know you live in Connecticut, playing house in the shed out back and baking chocolate chip cookies that you always burn. They dilate your pupils and find nothing. It is all in your mind, shifting back and forth. You are conscious in this world and unconscious wherever it is you came from.
It started the day you got on that plane. The moment they told you you were moving, you took a long, long nap. Everything for two years now has been in a sort of liminal space, as if they have delayed your plane and you’re lost in the terminal. Last call for boarding, American to SFO. If you see an unattended bag, tell security now. Take off your shoes in the TSA line. The Economist or Foreign Affairs at the Hudson News? Your mother wants you to watch the suitcases. Try not to use too much water at the restroom sink; you’re moving to drought country. You’re never going back.
Every so often you stand up and feel as if you are going to faint. You take this as a sign that you’re almost ready to wake up. You have rubbed your wrists raw by pinching yourself; you always feel some phantom pain. Sometimes you forget key details of your childhood, basic facts about yourself. You take this as a sign that your dream has wiped your memory of all but the most important facts: where you’re from, where you’re going, who your family is. The rest has been replaced with an impenetrable fog that surrounds everything you care about most, as if all your real memories have given way to these strange fantasies. When you sit on the tire swing in your local park, you close your eyes and see the Atlantic Ocean, the tide pools anointed with August rain. You try your best to go home. You spend hours perched at your desk writing a letter in messy handwriting, telling your mother’s boss to fire her so you can wake up. Of course, you exclude the waking-up thing, but the rest stays the same. The letter fails, as you knew it would, and so your mind stays floating in the dream-world, Pioneer 11 drifting alone among the stars, only blank space in sight.
Someday forget that this is a dream. It becomes ever more difficult to believe you have imagined your life, and you will begin to want it all to have happened. The California poppies continue bursting onto the hill near your home, the color of raw egg yolk splattering concrete. They keep you asleep just as they once soothed Demeter into a welcome oblivion. You see colors you had not known existed, the kind that tile the vision of the pollinators in your garden with sparkling, indescribable joy (you often wonder what the mantis shrimp notices glistening on the seafloor).[1] You never want to dream another moment, and in fact you stop remembering your dreams. You’re back where you were, imagining California, but you know you aren’t there. Everything around you exists, and you rejoice in it.
[1] The mantis shrimp has what is believed to be the most expansive vision of any creature; it perceives more colors than the human brain can comprehend. Does this mean it sees patterns in the air, flowers in brighter and more specific shades than we can imagine? You wish you knew.
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