The Ball is Blue




The walls had a hint of a tan-off-white, an almost sandy color that came with the sun. I recalled the texture as my lucky red ball bounced off again and again. Red, it is red, I thought. I made a note of it in my journal.

“The ball is red, the walls are a sandy color in the sun, and I bounce the ball off it all day long. This journal is a calming shade of brown leather, and when you smell it, it feels like you are sinking into couch cushions.”

I wrote it all down, all of the details. The first step is always to record the details, and the next step is always to doubt them.

I wrote: “But this red ball, this red ball is not real, for it was not but two pages ago that I wrote that my ball was blue.” The actions that follow always come from the heart. When one knows they are dreaming, or rather, becomes omnipotent within themselves, they set all logic aside. We never really think clearly about what we should do when anything is possible, we just do or see what is most important to us at the time. Usually, flying away is most important, and that is just what I did. I flew over the blue bed, holding the red ball,  through the clear window, and, as we all do, lost myself in the white clouds.

Hello, wanderer.

I am an explorer of dreams, and I explore them for a paradoxical purpose: to embrace and escape them.

I walk the streets, pretending to be normal—which is another thing we all do—in spite of my line of work, my double life as an imaginary investigator. I make a note of how the leaves rustle a bit before my mighty feet defeat them. It makes a crunchy noise, and I write it all in my journal a second time. Am I positive that leaves make a crunchy sound? I make a nice metaphor to better illustrate what a crunchy sound is like.

“Crunchy like a hundred bones popping into place.”

It was perfect. And yet, it wasn't perfect, for it was not but three pages ago that I had described the crunching of a different leaf as the crumpling of paper. I cursed aloud to the heavens.

“Damn thee! I have been fooled yet again.” I do what is most important to me at the time, and I run. I run because the drama of feeling like I must escape makes the dream more...awesome (and I mean this in the truest sense of the word).

In my journal I record how my vision is in third person (characteristic of dreams), and of how I see myself through the quivering branches of a tree, behind me is a worn brick building. Next I describe how I feel about drama in dreams, and declare that it is as satisfying as the sun's nectar, which I pour down my throat from the goblet of the unreal. I write this too, just before flying into the clouds with my journal.

The tricky part is waking up. Pay attention, for this is critical.

“I wake up with the sunlight again, but this time the walls are blue, a few shades darker than the sky.”

“The lamp is turned on, it has blue and off-white stripes spiraling down its shade. But the shade is short and strange somehow I cannot define. It rests upon an invisible wood cabinet somewhere in my room, but it has no concrete location.” I observed my notes a few times before discerning quite conclusively that I was dreaming. Somehow, it was as if my dreams, or a part of myself had attempted to fool me; I never really knew whether or not I was awake.

Then I explode from the ceiling and into the sky.

I fell into my bed, drenched in sweat, disoriented as I emerge from the other world. The bed is brown with distinctive wooden patters, my blue blankets have slowly constricted my body into a cocoon, but I'm able to remove them. In dreams, getting out of bed is impossible. A roaring always comes to my ears and I know that if I get up, I will awake not to reality, but to a nightmarish world. Close your eyes. Close them and don't you dare open them. You'll feel a throbbing in your chest, you know the roof of your room has torn apart in some hurricane wind. Reality falls apart in layers, starting with the sky swarming to earth, then the branches shake away with their leaves, right before the ground quakes. I once tried to escape, I tried to run through the hall and I saw a mirror image of myself at the other end, smirking at me with eyeless sockets. Faces formed on the walls growling as the reappeared behind me. They grew arms and reached out for me. I fear that one day I will become so lost in dreams that I will become trapped in such a place, lingering in and out of a shadowy hall, torturing the next brave explorer.

But my eyes always open.

I made a check list of everything, just to be safe. Blue covers and blue walls, a few shades darker then the sky, a brown bed with distinctive patterns, a blue ball on my night table that I like to bounce on the walls, a journal with a comforting leather scent, the furniture of my room: stagnant and concrete, the lamp is on my night table, stripes and all. A yellow light overcast by the sun's strength.

The stillness in everything told me it was all real this time. I made a note of the beige carpet, the  positions and colors of all the trinkets and memories placed on my desk. Whenever I escape from myself to your hyper-real realm, a wind will blow leaves past my eyes, harshly staring at your bizarre devotion to normality. You could know this dilemma, even understand it, but you would never appreciate it. I am a collector of details, of the worthless pieces of information that give a false resolution to life.