The Blip Report for Monday, June 10th 2024
an unfinished dream
An Unfinished dream, by William Lyon Shoestrap
This morning, I was drinking my coffee and reading some stories in the newspaper, when I got to the last page that had the obituaries, and I read about this one person’s passing, and where it said that she had died of natural causes. And I wondered what was meant by natural cases. I mean, we all have to die some day, so I guess that dying is natural, and so somehow, something caused her to just naturally pass away, like it was just her time, like her turn had now come.
But then I thought, what if it had said that she had died of un-natural causes? And I shuddered a little, because un-natural sounds like something strange, or foreboding, or ominous, or eerie, or mysterious. Or maybe it meant being utterly unseen and un-prepared. Well … if she had been un-prepared then she would have cleaned up and dressed up for going to bed as usual, while expecting to wake up in the morning. But if she had died naturally, it must have been unexpected, but maybe not unprepared.
Now, isn’t it a fact that in the seconds just before we wake, we dream. Does that mean that when we pass away, we don’t wake up and so, we don’t dream? And what were we going to dream about anyway? I mean, when we go to sleep, we lie down, and try to be very silent and very still, and try to forget about everything that happened that day, and try not to think about what might happen tomorrow. And maybe that last thought we had, right before we fell asleep, is what we try to recreate when we are waking up. But that thought has been lying there for hours and it might have faded or dispersed a bit, and when we are trying to put it back together without the missing pieces, it comes up partly there and partly missing, and perhaps that’s what we call a dream.
Or maybe that’s not the way it works. Maybe there’s a dream factory where everyone’s dreams are made. And all these dreams are sitting there, ready to use, on the shelf, and whoever wakes up first, is given the first one off the shelf, and whoever wakes up second, gets the next one off the shelf.
But that would seem to imply that dreams are merely random and spontaneous. I would tend to think that that last thought we had before we fell asleep determined what our dream would be about. Maybe if that last thought was about something sad, then we would be given a fresh dream from the sad shelf. Or if that last thought had been happy, we would get a fresh dream from the happy shelf. But would that mean that if we died un-naturally, then maybe we weren’t given a dream to have. And that if we died naturally, that maybe we were given a dream, but we just never had the chance to dream it. So then, that dream is still lying there, hoping that somehow, someone else may find it and dream it for us.
And just then, I realized that I had been quietly and calmly, sitting there and staring at the newspaper - day dreaming. And wishing that it would seem that I hadn’t been simply wasting my time, I took the newspaper and picked up my pen, and crossed out ‘died of natural causes’, and underneath it I wrote ‘died with an unfinished dream’.