There are dreams you wake from laughing, dreams you wake from screaming, dreams you wake from with your body still vibrating from the touch of a creature made of paralysis.
And then there are dreams like this one.
The dream that is not a nightmare, not a fantasy, not a revelation. The dream that is simply the ordinary, amplified. The dream where nothing happens, and the nothing happens with such precision, such unbearable fidelity, that you wake wondering why your brain spent its precious nocturnal processing power on this.
A school. An event. Work-sponsored. Your clothes are the clothes you wear every day. Your colleagues drift through the frame like background characters in a film about someone else’s life. One of them is your friend. His wife and baby are there, which is unusual, because in the waking world she exists only as a passing hello, a polite smile, a figure who exits before conversation can begin.
You see her and you think: I don’t know how to respond to her being here for so long. The thought is so mundane, so exquisitely normal, that it could be lifted directly from the internal monologue of any given afternoon.
Then the phone buzzes.
A WhatsApp from her. Come see me. A corner of the school, left side, where the driveway slopes down to the back. The smokers’ bench.
You think: Since when do we WhatsApp each other?
You go anyway.
This is the first incision: the summons without context. In dreams, we are accustomed to the surreal, the symbolic, the terrifying. But a summons from a colleague’s wife to a smokers’ bench, delivered via the most prosaic of modern technologies—this is a different kind of uncanny. It is the ordinary made suddenly significant, and significance without explanation is a form of dread.
You walk past your friend, your colleague, her husband. You do not tell him where you are going. You do not know why you are going. You simply go, because in dreams as in life, a summons from the periphery carries a weight that a summons from the center does not.
She is walking with the baby, showing him things. The serious expression from across the field—was it anger? Was it something else? You cannot read her from this distance. You cannot read her up close either.
When you finally reach the bench, when she finally settles into the conversation, it is about nothing.
Nothing you can remember. Nothing that justifies the walk, the anticipation, the silent crossing of the field. She asks about babies. You say you are afraid to hold them, afraid of dropping them, afraid of the smallness, the fragility. She asks other things, things that dissolve on waking like morning frost.
The conversation is pointless. The summons was empty. The serious expression was just a face at rest, misinterpreted across a green field.
This is the second incision: the anti-climax as the point.
In narrative, we are trained to expect significance. A summons must lead to something—a confession, a revelation, a danger, a love. The dream that subverts this expectation is not a failure of the dreaming mind. It is a mirror held up to life itself.
How many times have you been summoned—by a look, a message, a tone of voice—only to arrive and find nothing? How many serious expressions were just the face’s resting state? How many anticipated conversations dissolved into weather and small talk, leaving you standing at a smokers’ bench wondering why you crossed the field at all?
The dream is not about the wife of your colleague. It is about the architecture of anticipation. It is about the moment the mind creates a narrative—she wants something, she is angry, this matters—and then watches that narrative collapse against the indifferent wall of the ordinary.
The smokers’ bench is the right setting. A liminal space, neither inside nor outside, neither work nor home, a place for those who step out of the flow to feed a habit that is slowly killing them. It is where people go when they are not quite participating. It is where the summoned and the summoner meet, in the pause between the event and the nothing that follows.
She smokes. You lean against the wall. The baby watches with the ancient, unreadable eyes of the very young. The conversation loops back on itself, forgettable, forgotten.
And then you wake.
The first dream—the one you remembered perfectly at 3am, the lucid one, the exciting one—is gone. Dissolved. You cannot reach it, cannot reconstruct it, cannot even grasp the shape of what you lost. This is the third incision: the dream we forget is often more important than the dream we remember.
Because the forgotten dream is the one that got away. It is the proof that your mind contains vast architectures you will never explore, narratives you will never read, revelations you will never receive. The frustration of the forgotten lucid dream is the frustration of standing at the door of a room you were just in, knowing it contained something vital, and finding the door locked, the key gone, the room receding into the architecture of a building you cannot re-enter.
You had it. You were excited. Now it is nothing.
Just like the summons to the smokers’ bench. Just like the conversation that meant nothing. Just like the serious expression that was just a face.
The dream of the ordinary is the most profound dream of all. Because it reveals that our sleeping minds are not factories of the surreal, but archivists of the mundane. They replay the small tensions, the unasked questions, the half-noticed glances. They construct entire narratives around a WhatsApp message that, in waking life, would have been deleted without a thought.
And they force us to ask: If this is what my mind does with nothing, what does it do with something?
You walk back across the field. Your colleague says something you cannot remember. The event continues. The wife and baby eventually leave, returning to the periphery where they belong. The smokers’ bench sits empty, waiting for the next person who needs to step outside, who needs to feed a small death while the living go on living.
You wake. The first dream is gone. The second dream lingers, not because it was important, but because it was not important enough. And that, perhaps, is the most unsettling thing of all.
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