I have this reoccurring dream that haunts me.

In a sense, it’s like a nightmare. But it’s not like a normal nightmare where you wake up with knotted fists, in a cold sweat with your heart trying to escape from your chest. No, instead my nightmare begins when I wake up. And so my dream haunts me because of its azure loquacity, its empathetic artistry, and its simple-yet-timeless juxtaposition of man and earth and sea. My dream haunts me because it is everything my life is not. It returns each night and leaves me jealous and discouraged, hung over from want of a reality that is not and never will be mine.

In my dream - my nightmare, my glass bowl wonderland – life is perfect. It is a snapshot of divinity, a zenith of indescribable proportions. I’m sitting on a white sand beach on an island in the expansive blue of the Pacific Ocean. Hawaii, Tahiti, the Midways. Somewhere, anywhere. A small green speck in an expanse of unyielding blue. Before me, the Pacific – that ungodly moving body of water and spirituality – lays out before me. It is massive, it is striking. It makes me want to believe in God, to believe that only an infallible and all knowing hand could have created something of such majestic proportion. The waves become surf in a tinge of white and green before gently dying in their attempt to crawl onto the earth. The sun burns high in the air, temperately baking my skin to an acroamatic brown.

The compassionate sound of the ocean slowly melds with the birds and the wind. There are no people around me. I am alone in a place that transcends Rockwell, imagination, stories of Atlantis. Slowly, I fade into a state of stupor. The wispy white of the clouds and the taste of salt in the air become one and the same. The sand comes alive beneath me, the South Pacific – the breathtaking, mythical Pacific – rises before me.

Suddenly, I am consumed. I lay at the bottom of the sea in a nest of colors and currents. Oxygen is an afterthought, a joke. The sun is shattered into a million separate fragments light that sink slowly and disappear into the watery depths. The tide, of tireless world travel, ebbs around my body with dogged determination. I remark upon this current, this veteran of time and place. Its astounding to think that at one point, this same molecule of water – a tangled speck of oxygen and hydrogen – once swam in the frigid artic. Here, though, the water is warm and thaumaturgic. It is abound with a pulse of life and health, a continuum of sophisticated well being. The water tastes of salt and beach, but it dances lightly, frailly across my palette. I am free.

And then I begin to rise. Slowly at first. Faster. Faster. My ears pop when reach the surface and I am thrown into the air. I exploded into the air with a mercurial sense of purpose. I am buoyant. I am errant. I am not in control but I’m not scared. I’m relieved and I’m excited that for once, just once, the weight of potential and possibility has been lifted from my back. And still, I rise. Through the clouds, the misty fog gives way. I break free. Below, I can see the encompassing blue of the ocean speckled with dotted green mosaics of land. Here, I see the world in its sweeping, panoptic entirety. The beauty of this place grabs me by the throat, it punches me in the gut, it steals the air from my lungs.

Then, I wake up.

I instantly remember that I live in a dilapidated turn-of-the century brick building that is too cold in the winter and too hot in the summer. That I live in a sprawling suburban metropolis in the Midwest, surrounded by people who don’t know or care my name. I remember that I stay up too late, drink too much wine, smoke too many cigarettes. I remember that I am a psychologist’s wet dream: a mess of potential and self destructive habits, destined for failure or worse. I remember that I’m unemployed, unemployable, a self-conscious animal who lives on coffee and stolen prescription drugs.

I remember that I’m turning into my old man.

And this is my reality. My fucking reality is a pity party laced with dope, skin mags, and red wine. It’s a dark room with no way out and dust that sticks to the back of your throat. See, the thing about nightmares is that they end. They stop when you wake up. Reality, however, is constant. It throbs through the past and into the future. Reality is the cold voice that laughs in your ear, that tells you that you’re breath away from turning into a drunken asshole who pisses and shits on himself without remorse or embarrassment. It is also, then, reality that tells you not to worry about it. Take another drink, roll another joint, grab a handful of pills. Do something. Finish what you started. Be a man. Accept your destiny. Because reality always intersects with destiny. And destiny is a bitch. A shrieking, bi-polar bitch that spits in your face and steps on your toes. Destiny is reality fulfilled. Destiny is cumulative, destiny is reality actualized.

So, I hate my dream because its everything my reality is not. My reality, fast turning into a concrete statue of destiny, is my nightmare. I can’t escape it. My dream haunts me with its regularity, its certainty, its vivid depiction of time and place. It’s a monument of hope that that will never be achieved. It’s a gravestone to a life unfulfilled. It leaves me jealous and sour with withdrawal. My dream, despite its beauty, laughs at me with yellowing teeth and arctic eyes.

Waking up is my nightmare and it has no end, except for one.