I had a dream

I fall asleep and I am in Brighton, my adopted city, walking on the seafront.

As you would expect from a dream, the reality is warped, reshaped by the subconscious according to the current state of the dreamer.
And so, here I am in Brighton, walking on the seafront, a sweet smell filling the air, the scent of palm and agave basking in the sun. The shouts of seagulls rent the air. In the dream, they are as aggressive as you would expect, their dull, glassy eyes observing you, as if they were waiting for a reaction. All in all, it’s only their size that does not match reality.



Not far, on a dry strip of land, the number one enemy of seagull is pecking: it is the pigeon, also known as “the flying rat”. But in this dream things look smoother and friendlier. And so, for the sake of aesthetics, the colors are swapped: the body and the head are pink, and the claws are gray. You would think this is a lovely bird; eventually you could say that it is a parrot.



Next detail getting my attention is a shop serving fish and chips, the glorious fast food of the British Empire. Everything looks real in this dream, the only funny thing being the name of the shop: “Brighton Fish’n’Chips”. Why would you name your shop after the city it’s in? But, although I’m sleeping, somehow I’m aware of the fact that this is not reality, and so the name makes a lot of sense: it’s like a sign that the subconscious puts in the dream, to confirm that I’m really walking on Brighton seafront.



Ok, time to approach the beach. It’s there that I fully understand that this is lucid dreaming and I laugh at the tricks of the mind: a sign reading “Brighton beach”, mixing Brighton reality (Strong Currents), Australian cliché (Large Waves and Snakes), and unknown elements (what the f&*k are Sandbars, I wonder… probably just a word that I heard/read somewhere before falling asleep).



Sometimes I wonder how you feel when you are dead (assuming you can feel anything) and how different is that state compared to the condition of being asleep. Clearly I don’t know the answer, and it’s not the purpose of this blog to give one, but rationally there is one thing that I’m sure of: if you are asleep you always wake up… And often, the passage between dream and reality is smooth, with the two melting together, probably in order to make less bitter the feeling of being awake yet again (sorry, some emo thinking emerging from my adolescence…): and so the kid that is pissing in bed dreams of water, the worker that set up an alarm in the evening dreams of lousy and annoying noises.

And so, in this lucid dreaming, a car sounds the horn and laughing, in my dream, I think: “Ok, worker, it’s time to wake up! Bloody alarm is ringing…” And what a surprise when I open my eyes and I realize that all this was not a dream, but a crazy walk underneath the Australian sun ended with me fainting in the middle of Brighton road…