The Art of Dreaming 

She tells me to close my eyes. I sigh, fidgeting in the chair across from her. 

I think it’s amusing that they always start with that. It’s as though

they’re playing peek-a-boo, and they think that when they cover their eyes with their hands our jaws will drop in a one-year-old’s incredulity. 

She tells me to close my eyes and imagine the first thing that comes

into my head, and so I sigh again and think about elephants with only three horns. It prances in the muddy snow of my cerebrum, and places its heart inside my left ear canal. From outside myself, she asks me to explain what I see, and so I tell her I see desperation. 

I squint my eyes open and watch between my fuzzy eyelashes as

her penciled eyebrows lift off her eyes.
“No, dear,” she says. “Tell me what you i magine . Use your mind’s eye and tell me what your soul sees.”
I squirm in the plastic seat and rub my nose. It’s almost audible - the groan hidden by her small-lipped frown.
That cerulean sparrow with a limp wing coughs up fire onto my throat and I sigh, again, feeling it rustle through the 

filebox of my memories. It only looks at the recent ones though, the ones dripping with that sticky, sappy residue that coats every thought I’ve had since I arrived at this strange camp. 

“Well, dear? What do you see, with your soul ?” 

She says the word soul as if it were worth Aztec gold. When you repeat

the same words over and over, like her, they seem to simultaneously be sanctified with holy water and depreciate to that of coughed-up dust. The thought makes me sigh again. What a shame it is, to make something as beautiful as words as no more than another currency. 

“Dear?”

“I see questions.”

I open my eyes this time, and her pretty face ages with fatigue.

“No, dear,” she repeats, but her soul isn’t in it. “What do you imagine?

I want you to paint me a dreamscape, color me a fairytale, broaden your mind. I want you to start seeing more than just the mundane, dear.”

Her brown eyes could be pretty, if she smiled more. Now they

look like motel coffee.

“Well then.” She purses her lips and looks down, letting her hair

flood over her shoulders. “

I’m sorry,” I offer. It’s true. I’m sorry she doesn’t understand. 

“It’s alright, dear,” she says, giving me a well-worn, closed-lip smile.

“That’s why you’re here. We’ll get you all fixed up in no time.” 

She stands, so I follow, peeling my thighs off of the chair with a

grimace. This pink skirt is too small, but I’ve discovered that everything in this place comes up short. 

We step out of her cubby-hole office and onto the sidewalk, which is

more weeds than concrete. There is a green field before us that is eaten up by the forest, and along the misshapen little sidewalk are other cubby-hole offices and buildings, moss-lined and brick-built. She told me that they were “little fairy buildings,” but I have decided that they are more akin to rolley-polley's dentures than anything else. Close to nature, but still fabricated. Useful to some, but not to this camp. 

She guides me back around the last of the denture-buildings, and we turn straight into a blinding sunset between the green house and the cafeteria (she insists on calling it the banquet hall). 

“What are you thinking about now, dear?” she asks, sliding her eyes

over to mine as we walk. 

I look at the sun for a moment to gather my thoughts. A crab stands

at the back of my tongue, struggling as papers keep falling from his feathered hands. He cusses a slew of green-and-brown expletives before collapsing upon his mountain of papers and, losing his balance, tumbles down the waterfall of my throat. 

I shrug.

“Just death,” I say, and smile as the sunlight drops a little lower,

as if it were being dipped by the cafeteria chimney. Beside me, the woman coughs. “That’s... nice.”
We walk in silence from then on.

Later that night, after we eat hot dogs and debate if princes should marry peasant girls or mermaids, we walk to the pool. Maybe it’s because our shoulders are wrapped up in towels, or maybe because the moon is a laughing yellow, but everyone chatters breathlessly. It’s not a nice pool in any regard - and shoved between the lush courtyards and rustic cabins, it looks more than out of place - but the other girls told me that it's warm. The lights are on under the water, so that everything is bathed in a midnight-turquoise that seems to quiver with the water, as if we were all just a grainy television show. The sky is not black (I don’t understand why people make such generalizations), but more like a drunken rainbow. Still the same dazzling rainbow, but it forgot a few colors and mixed the rest together in whiskey. 

We all line up with our toes dangling over the edge of the pool, our

skin prickling with goosebumps. 

“This is your first test, girls!” The woman calls. Her eyes disappear into

the shadows of her face, and her skin turns to a plastic blue-white. I feel the girl beside me shiver. 

“You may only jump in the water when you’ve told me your

wildest dream!”

The unconscious silence that lingered above us lifts, suddenly, and

the girls begin to laugh.
A girl far to my left shouts across the pool. “I dream of walking in golden fields, arm-in-arm with my beautiful husband!”

Blushing smiles ripple away through the line, and the woman’s warm nod is followed quickly by a splash.
There is a mad rush of voices, then, and the woman’s face lifts ever so slightly as all those shivering girls disappear 

below the cloudy blue.

“I dream of saving the world from a great fire!”

“I want to hold my rosy-cheeked child!”

“I want to sing like the angels!”

“Let me be beautiful... forever!”

The smell of chlorine burns in my eyes. I watch them go, their fuzzy heads of hair disappearing into droplets, then coming up smooth and dark. Eventually, their eyes fall on my shaking knees, my sighing shoulders.
 

“What do you dream of, dear?” the woman calls. I meet her gaze and smile. And I sigh again.
“It’s not so hard,” says the girl who jumped first. “Just use your imagination! Like we learned!”

There is a giraffe sneezing stars onto my eyes, and I feel the grainy pool fading away. But it is hard, I think. It is so hard to know what you want, and what is wanted for you by the stories of another’s imagination. Deep in my soul, I feel a sudden rattling, and the number three storms up to the doorway of my mind. He takes me by the shoulders, stares me down with motel coffee eyes, and sings opera. And I realize that this is my wildest dream. This moment here. The opera turns to truth on my lips. 

​

“Happiness,” I whisper. 

​

Imagination, I think, is a piece of yourself. It cannot be taught.

And it should not be judged. It is the snow on your Kilimanjaro, shining like a million questions. But it is not the answer. 

“I want happiness, and I want it right here,” I whisper, and the

ladybugs under my skin begin to hum. “I want to be here, because there is no wilder dream than the present.”