The Longest Dream, by Michael Colbert

The longest dream of all is called Life, your very existence, your very reality into a life with illusions of grandeur, metaphors and mixed emotions on a grand scale of what you see, hear, feel, smell, taste and perceive as life. From the five natural senses in the physical realm of time, space and dimensions (width, length and depth) the five natural senses correlating and corresponding with the five connecting body parts (the five fingers, the five toes), connected to the head, two arms, two legs which is all significant. This dream called life began long before you were born, before you physically existed in your natural body (a gas, that liquified into a solid), the three stages of matter in its natural order (gas, liquid, solid). This dream or thought existed in your father’s mind, soul and spirit as Father Time. It existed in your mother’s womb (Mother Nature). It existed in your grand and great, great, great parents going all the way back as far as time and space itself in a natural process, and while you were in a warm womb of darkness feeling protected and comforted in a vacuum of tiny space, you still sensed light, you heard sounds, you tasted the mental and physical sustenance from the umbilical cord of life, you could smell and see things with the power of your third eye (the developing mind), you could feel things in the warmth of this darkness as you kicked and wiggled in what seems like an endless and ageless liquified substance, and then the light shone, appearing bright, born out of the necessity and essence of a warmth of darkness, you became cold as ice as the dark liquified warmth of substance dissipated into a sensational cold wetness, a sharpness of tingling and vibrating pain; shocking your body awake in the light, all the nerves and senses now fully awaken by a SMACK! You yell out in a cry! Then someone says, (“It’s alive, a ugly Frankenstein”) No! (“I’m alive, a beautiful human being”) You yell out more, unable to stop breathing. It’s so strange because before the light shone, you didn’t have to do nothing, but now you have to keep breathing because the old reality that was warm and dark and ever so comfortable has left you, the old dream is now a new dream, a new reality of light and coldness, a new reality of pain where everything intensifies, a disattachment from the darkness, the warmth, into light of coldness, a Biblical cord of separation, you can sense the separation from smell, taste, touch, hearing and soon sight, you know you have awaken from one dream into another, the old reality is distached, but you hold on to her anyway for dear life, she caresses you, she holds you, she cradles and cuddles you for she somehow is you! You have now entered your longest dream called Life, the one shot deal, a roller coaster of magical moments you’ll never forget; there are some things in this dream we call life you might not recall because of short term, long term memory! And even though we can’t recall everything about the long dream, we never forget it, our subconscious mind holds everything we experience in this long dream called life, remembering before yesterday (the darkness), remembering yesterday (the twilight) and recalling today to foresee tomorrow (the light). It’s always in that order, within the longest dream called life, we day dream, we night dream which are the short dreams of places, times, people, and other dimensions of twisted fates, fantasies of fortune and places of beauty, horror, hopes of desire; a subconscious state that’s shortly lived in thought only to be awakened to the longest dream, life. In each short dream we are captivated, capable of escaping the long dream, sometimes wanting to come back to that long dream life, because we become afraid of the short dream’s heights, width, and constant movements, like the mirrors in a fun house with distorted figures, a river flowing erratically; where everything continues in the form of today! The long dream only stop and pauses when short dream begins, and when the short dream ends, awaking you back into the long dream of life (sometimes in your bed, wondering, perspiring, shaking) (sometimes on a crowded bus or train’s seat with watchful eyes) sometimes the short dream is the same, but it always changes real fast in different regions in the mind of thought, time, space and other dimensions. You might recall every detail of the long dream existence, but the short dream is forever weary, the short dream can start yesterday and end yesterday, the short dream can start today and end yesterday going back and forth from middle to beginning or from ending to beginning and all in between, not having to go straight at all. However, the long dream life can only go forward in linear time, for the long dream is life itself, your life, and when the long dream ends, there’s no more dreams, short or long! For the long dream is your very reality, your entire life. All the short dreams are only made up and produced by the power of the long dream’s precious existence.

Peace!

Michael Colbert is one of the pillars of this intriguing creative writing course who would like to share and welcome all to a fun reading of his personal experience in a long journey of an imaginative mind. Michael has been part of Re/Creation since participating in its earliest workshops on Rikers Island, and has been instrumental in developing our organization.