Overview
Medium: Poem (Free Verse)
Written: October 2023
First Performed: Bardic Madness XXV, for Challenge 3.2 – “Perchange to Dream”
Why is it that one common man
Wishes another pleasant dreams
And prays to not be plagued
By the horrors of nightmares?
Dreams may give us the chances we do not have
To live full lives,
To do grand things,
To see places thought impossible.
To reunite with loved ones since lost,
To find love when life has none.
To find happiness for the first time
That you can ever recall.
But then to awake to find them for naught,
None but a fiction of the mind.
The joy they brought fading
Just as quickly as their memory.
The common man takes this as a gift,
A short reprieve from the troubles of life.
But I find no comfort, no respite
In this farce of the mind.
For it makes a mockery of what I desire
In my deepest of hearts
But lies far out of my reach
Within the world of the waking.
If one may remain within the dream
And live in glorious illusion forever
Then I too would seek their deceptions
But thus is not the way of life.
No, I shall take the nightmares.
For never once have I awoken from a nightmare
To find myself disappointed by the reality I found.
But it is from the most pleasant of dreams
That I begin my day weeping.
Notes
This poem began as a musing I had in 2021, while speaking with a friend about my depressing dreams. He was very confused about why my dreams were bothering me, as they were often about very nice things. Being happy in life, finding a loving partner, having no worries. “Why do these things depress you?” he asked, “Aren’t these good things? Things that you want?”
“Of course they are” I replied, “That’s why they’re depressing. Because when I wake up it’s all taken away from me. I’m given everything that would make me happy and then in a moment it’s gone, and I’m back in reality, barely remembering any of the dream but knowing that in there, at least I was happy.”
Later that day I typed the following in my document of musings, which I keep for when I have the rare philosophical thought.
The common man prefers good dreams over nightmares, but not once have I awoken from a nightmare and been disappointed to find myself in reality.
In preparation for Bardic Madness XXV, I decided it was time to finally expound on it further. I started with no specific form or rhyme scheme in mind. I wanted to keep the lines short, and the stanzas all the same length, presenting it in a series of short thoughts.
The only specific choice of form I made can be seen in stanzas 2 and 3, where all of the lines about things dreams can do begin with the word “To”. This was done not only to make the lines group together as they all speak of the same sort of thing, but also to hammer home the point that these things are only a potential, not a certainty. You can’t know what dreams will bring until they happen, until then it can be anything. I suppose the same is true for reality as well. Call that a little inspirational Easter egg in an otherwise rather bleak poem.
Angist Arts 