Winter Dreams
Written By: João Raphael Reis
Do you feel like you dream more during the Winter? I do. And I asked this question to a couple of friends this morning.
Ima said she dreams of numbers during Winter. 1 is slim and tall like a tree. 2 reads upside down, indecisive if it’s a 2 or a 5, or sometimes a Z. She said that numbers walk and chat in her dreams. An infinite quantity of numbers. A finite night of six hours of sleep. Some nights, the numbers organize themselves as if they played in the Canadian Football League. Huddled. Wearing spiked helmets like serif. Trying to knock you down before you throw the ball. This football gang follows Ima. They scream “Tuition Fee!”. Knocked by the fees, her only alternative is to wake up and get a summer job. Some other nights, Ima says, the numbers play for another team: “the Grades”. They wear official jerseys: some say “A’s”, but others say “B’s”. Round, huge, and frightening, the “F’s” are shaped like zeros. They fiercely surround her, but she’s knowledgeable enough to avoid them every night. Ima wakes up every morning convinced that university life is a gang of terrorizing numbers coming at you. “But we never give up on graduating.”
My friend Hope dreams of words. More precisely, mid-terms. Their constant dream is that the words in their mid-terms will assemble and become a monster. A monster made out of words, essays, digits, and algorithms. The monster has the word “incorrect” tattooed on its left arm and the word “failed” on the right. It is avid for tiny students and their dreams of graduation. Hope constantly dreams they are running from this all-swallowing monster. They can’t hide, and they can’t fight, and they can’t predict the movements of this surreal and larger-than-life creature. Hope said last time they had this dream, all they did was stand still. “Did it work?”, I asked them. “I am still afraid of the monster. But I always take a deep breath, so it’s not the end of the world.”
I, myself, have been dreaming of my mom this Winter. Maybe because I decided to live far from home. Or maybe because I come from a lineage of teachers and professors. People of strong opinions about school. Demanding people. Mom would always analyze my grades when I was a kid. Attention to detail in compositions I would hand in to my teachers. She was my fiercest editor at home. But this Monday I dreamt that she was at my university. Correcting my wrongs, misdemeanors, and misspellings, she was both the professor and my mom in the dream. She crossed out three or four paragraphs in my dreamlike essay. I freaked out and panicked, and I wanted to call, “Mom!” – but it happened that the mom was the teacher and the teacher was the mom. Suddenly, the tables turned in my dream and I turned out to be the professor to my student mom. This dream-teacher version of me held her test and said, “You failed.” The following morning, I called my mom. I told her everything about my dream. But I just couldn’t confess the obvious: somehow, my dream is to be like her.
“Do you want to become a teacher?” she asked me.
“I don’t know.”
“First, don’t be hard on yourself as a student. You’ll do it. Read your books. Eat well. Wear winter jackets. Have at least eight hours of sleep. And don’t forget to have fun with your friends. It’s just another semester.”
Ima, Hope, me. It’s just another semester.
