The purpose of a Dream

The purpose of a Dream



Dreams in sleep
Do nothing more
Than prepare us
For our eventual waking
From the real dream.

Just as we return home
Each morning to our beds
We will return home
To an even more familiar place;

The stranger within this dream, too-

The loathed
Or the beloved
Who we fervently believed in
As if the script
Wrote itself
With each move we made
Like all the littler versions
We birthed in between
The beginning
And the end-

Will no longer exist.

Or
Perhaps we’ll spend eternity
Recycling through the minds
Of those still living
Bouncing in and out of their dreams
Gradually being demoted
From ingenue
To mother
To a mere extra in the background
To an imperceptible shape
Who the dreamer senses, but does not
Or cannot acknowledge.

And perhaps in this moment,
We might finally realize
That even the solitary leaf
At the peak of a dying tree
10 blocks from our home
One childhood autumn
Needed to exist
To make life what it was
And what it is now,
In someone else’s dream.