Wishing to sleep... Fearing to dream...

I haven't been sleeping much lately, and I think it is because I have been dreaming every time I get a good night's sleep. That doesn't make much sense until the content of the dreams is explored. My dreams have been so vivid, engrossing, and enjoyable that I think I am scared that my mind will refuse to wake from them if I allow myself to dream. Let us examine my last dreaming experience as evidence of this.

Last... not exactly night. It was 4:30 before I actually fell asleep. During my last sleep cycle, I began dreaming, and while doing so, slept through the alarm I had set.

"What dream was it that was so enthralling that I refused to wake from it?" one might ask.

We lay on the sand. Not the sand of a beach mind you. There were no waves. There was no water. No, this was the dry sandy soil of a desert - Arizona I believe. By the deepness of the black surrounding us, I could feel that we were many miles from civilization. We were the only humans amongst the wilderness.

Looking up at the clear night's sky above us, I could see everything. I don't mean I could see all the stars. I mean that I could see everything. It was as if my eyes were more powerful than the Hubble telescope. The multitude of stars from our Milky Way Galaxy dimmed before the splendor I saw. I could see billions of galaxies in the depth of the night's sky. Looking on that sky, I truly understood how minuscule and ephemeral each and every human life is. The scale of the universe crashed down to the point where I realized that, to the universe, I was smaller than a single atom of my body is to me. If I were to suddenly vanish, who or what would miss me? What difference would it make?

... And then, as the bleakness seemed to reach its peak, you reached over and took my hand. In that moment, with you holding my hand, despite the understanding of how truly small I was, I felt like the most important thing in the cosmos. I was important because I was important to you. Somehow, of all the things in this vast existence, I was the one you wanted to be with, there, in the middle of the Arizona desert, and that was all that mattered.

Thus, my heart yearns to sleep again. It aches to feel that connectedness, that love, and begs my mind and body to follow it into slumber.

My mind remembers though. It remembers the feeling as I woke. The return of the loneliness as my hand moved across an otherwise empty bed. My mind remembers, and fears that feeling when I wake from another such dream.