The Dreams You Don't Remember

You dreamed something important last night. I know this because you always do and you never remember and the forgetting is the cruelest part. Dreams are letters from a version of you who doesn't speak your language. They use symbols instead of words: the house with too many rooms. The exam you didn't study for. The teeth. Always the teeth. We spend a third of our lives in a country we can't remember visiting. Think about that. A third. That's decades of stories told by a brain that locked the door and wrote the plot without asking for your input. I dreamed my father once— years after he was gone. He was standing in a kitchen that doesn't exist making coffee that I could smell. He looked up and said: you're doing fine. I woke up crying. Not because it was sad. Because for thirty seconds I had him back and the coffee was real and the kitchen was real and the lie my brain told me was the kindest lie I've ever been told. Dreams don't mean what the books say. They mean what you feel when you wake up. That's the interpretation. That's the only one that matters. So tonight, when you close your eyes and the other you takes over, let them. Let them build the house with too many rooms. You might need them all someday.