July 16, 2012

  • Greek Dreaming

    I.

    “Look at the sign, it’s cool how you can hang letters on it” I told my father as he drove along the narrow Greek road. “What are you talking about?” my father said, in a challenging tone I rarely hear him use. My father is patient with his children, and I realized that what I had said must have made no sense. I had said something more like “letter on it” when I had spoken out loud. I swallowed, tried to reform the sentence properly and woke up. There was no sign.

    II.

    When I come to Greece, I can’t stop dreaming. In America, I sleep very soundly through the night. I can very easily sleep 2 hours one night and 12 the next, and never remember a single dream. Here in Greece, I am constantly waking up during the stifling nights, and falling asleep during the day. And thus I am constantly in a dream-like state. But my dreams, so recently rediscovered, are mundane. I fight to wake up during a dream during which I am being excluded from a basketball game at my old high school. “REALLY?” my thoughts rage. “A high school exclusion dream? I have to lie through such an obvious heavy-handed dream, with no nuance or plot development whatsoever?What’s next, the dream where I must give a speech I am not prepared for? How  cliche!” I grit my teeth, watching my 10th grade friends play in their uniforms as I stand outside the gym. CS Lewis may have thought to terrify children with the island where dreams come true. But the monsters of my island have no claws and gum their victims to death.

    III.

    I used to think that dreamers are attracted to tropical climates. Once again I have underestimated geography. No, the heat creates the dreamer, embeds them in a past-future that ebbs and flows like the heat waves.I coexist in two mental states: years ago and tomorrow. There is no today, it recedes the more one struggles to focus on it. Freed from the tyranny of today,I become much more productive. I sent off a piece of work I had been struggling to finish for months in just two days here. Yet I am not at peace. Freed from the comfort of today, my mind is unrestrained, focusing on names nearly forgotten and fretting about experiences that barely registered on my emotional radar when they first occurred.

    IV.

    The tourist addresses my father and I from the road. His German accent is prominent as he asks for the location of the pharmacy. My father, the retired engineer, gives him directions confidently. He has an ability to determine directions and locations that I have always envied. The tourist asks how far it is to walk to the pharmacy. My father tells him the pharmacy is only 10 minutes away. I, formerly an engineer, correct my father,as the tourist has no hat and I worry about him catching sunstroke on his way.“Twenty minutes away” I say, and the tourist decides to wait to make the trip until the sun is less intense. After all, pharmacies are always farther away than one thinks they are.

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