At 4am the alarm on Janie’s phone goes off. It is generally my first instinct to throw the happily chiming phone across the room and roll over and go back to sleep. While the urge to do so these days is typically a result of being dog tired and nowhere near ready to face another grueling day, when the alarm went off this morning the response was more of a mournful sigh.
You see, I was having the most deliciously happy dream.
It was a long, complex dream and I won’t sport with your patience enumerating all the details and their likely meaning, besides, I have homework to do. However, the part that I was so rudely awakened from was the marvelous stuff of young girl fantasies. Or, the result of reading one too many racy re-visitations of Pride and Prejudice over my winter break.
In my dream I apparently ran off and married a handsome cowboy (part of the long complicated part). I was in a restaurant walking up to our table and my dream self felt overwhelmingly elated to see him sitting there waiting for me. I put my hand on his shoulder and leaned over to kiss his forehead, but, before I could, he reached up, took my face in his manly hands and kissed me the kind of kiss that must be what is meant by the phrase ‘it made my toes curl.’
Awash in the glow of love and tingling with passion, my dream self suddenly noticed there was a woman we knew from an earlier part of the dream at the table, too. My dream self became self-conscious to be kissing so intimately in a public place under the scrutiny of an acquaintance, and so I pulled away from the kiss and whispered that we were making too much of a spectacle.
My dream cowboy laughed, pulled me onto his lap and drawled, “Well, there, my dear wife, I don’t reckon I care one bit if the whole world sees how much I love you.”
The acquaintance smiled and said, “Oh, how wonderful! I knew you two would be just perfect together. Tell me all about the wedding.”
And, my dream self and my cowboy began to tell of touring Switzerland and Austria (????). Suddenly, *cue sound of needle being dragged across a record album* my alarm went off. I found myself unceremoniously ripped from that wonderful feeling of being young and in love, when the giddy power of being with the one person you love more than anything leaves you oblivious to obstacles, impervious to distress, and high on joy and the expectation of a long life of happiness ahead.
Back to the hum drum of my real existence: the cold, lonely mornings; my long, lonely days; the aches and pains caused by soul crushing hours of studying, worrying and hurrying. The dream was a wonderful one, a moment of happiness and hope in the course many days of hard work, deprivation and emotional stress. When the dream is more pleasant than the real world, can you blame me for wanting to roll over and go back to sleep instead of going to physics lab? Oh, my dear readers, I emphatically assure you, kissing dream cowboys is definitely more engaging than electrical circuitry.
But, maybe if I work very hard like our dear Cinderella, one day the dreams that I wish will come true.
I did, after all, land the coolest research job I could imagine, so at least one dream has started to come true. Now if only I had some mice and some bluebirds to help me with my homework…
Janie's Place 