Dreaming that you went back

It was so vivid that for a few seconds after you opened your eyes it was still real. You had one. You were standing somewhere ordinary with a cigarette in your hand and the taste in your mouth, and none of it felt like a dream, it felt like a Tuesday. Then the room came back and you lay there running the checks: did I, when, where, no. The relief comes second. The guilt comes first, and it sits on the whole morning as though you actually did something.

You did not do anything. A dream is not a confession. It is also not a warning about tomorrow. What your brain was doing at four in the morning is what it does with everything it is finished using: taking an enormous, heavily rehearsed piece of your life and filing it away. Years of smoking do not get deleted when you stop, they get packed up, and packing is noisy work that happens at night. The dream is the archive, not the appetite.

There is something in that first waking second worth keeping. Before you were awake enough to be good, before any program or promise or discipline was available to you, your unguarded reaction to having done it was no. Not longing. Not a quiet wish that it were true. Dread, and then relief that it was not. That was not a decision. It was a reading, taken from the part of you that never performs for anyone, and it says you have already moved. Whoever wanted this is not who woke up.

So when it happens again, and it probably will, do not spend the morning underneath it. Say the plain fact out loud on the way to the kitchen: that was a dream, and I did not. Then get on with your day and leave the guilt unfed, because guilt charged for something you never did will happily take payments forever. Thank God for a night of filing and a morning that is still clean. The dreams thin out on their own. They are the sound of an old life being put in a box.