When reality rushes back in after a dream

It was after waking up from a strange dream that I was struck by the force of life without context.

Context is what seems to give life meaning, and without context, life is simultaneously too empty to bear, and also beautiful.

As it goes with strange dreams, this one was impressively nonsensical. I was in the back seat of my friend’s car. He was dropping me off at what seemed like a small European airport. The terminal was crowded and the line was long; people were impatient. When it was our turn, I was not quite ready to hop out because I was finishing a Mario Kart track on my Nintendo DS (yes I’m gaming at age 26 in this dream). I bumbled and stumbled and got my things together and hopped out the car door. Some Europeans behind us mumbled something rude about Americans. I apologized to my friend for being unprepared.

Although unbelievably trivial, this airport incident seemed to trigger psychosis in my friend; the dream flashed forward to some time in the future, where he died in some kind of bizarre street fight. (In real life my friend is mild mannered and not inclined to fight. Preposterous! All dreams are preposterous!)

I woke up. What was that? What was that?

When you wake up from a dream, especially a wacky one, you can sometimes be thrust, briefly, into a peculiar state of consciousness, one that is apparently hard to reach through sober or unmeditated means. In this altered state, the schemata of your dream, the logic, the emotion, it falls apart slowly and then all at once; this new consciousness exists in the moments between awakening and “regular life,” when you start to forget details of the dream.

Slowly and then all at once—I’m not watching a deadly street fight; I’m lying in bed. I’m not in some grim, mysterious city; I’m in a guest room, listening to the whir of the fan and the buzz of insects outside. Later today I’ll fly home to be with my family for Christmas, with all of the attendant excitement and anticipation. These things are the context of reality, and they rushed into my mind like air into a vacuum. As it happened I felt strangely empty. The only reason this day, or even this moment, feels different than any other is because of the context I just described. But when the context of reality is warped, as it is after a dream, you can see life in a simpler form—mere awareness. Every moment is exactly the same, but dressed differently in the contexts we conceive to keep ourselves busy.

That is terrifying, but it could also be beautiful. Really—that’s all there is? Yes—that’s all there is.