Life in dreams

interesting story
By José Joaquín López

I've been dreaming of the same dream for twelve years. It is a continuous dream, that is, when I fall asleep at night and start to dream, the dream continues at the point where it stayed the night before. It is as if I lived another life inside the dream, by episodes, every night. At first I was curious and enjoyed it, but now I wish I had dreamed other things like all people, and even, never having dreamed. In that other life, the one that I live in dreams, the other night I was dying.

At some point in my childhood I thought that turning 25 would have already reached the goals that society regularly teaches you that are good: a university job, a good job, a house, a good wife. All that I had to reach at that age to consider myself successful. However, when I reached that age I did not have any of it, I was just a lesser employee in a mall store. He spent as many hours as possible inside the mall and came home exhausted; the university had been left for later. I lived in a cheap boarding house. My girlfriend had left me the day before my twenty-fifth birthday after six years together.

When I had reached the age when I had thought I had achieved all my goals, I had not achieved anything. It was a total failure. Going to the mall on my birthday and attending to a furious customer for a minor detail, I thought it was possible for me to stay forever in that job I hated. I did not hate it because I considered it unworthy or inhuman, but because it seemed boring to me in the extreme. Go every day to one place and do the same thing over and over again. Then return home, turn on the TV, eat and sleep. And so every day.

That day, on my twenty-fifth birthday, I began to dream another life. Another life where I had achieved everything I dreamed, where I was the winner. While in the day I was bored to die at work, at night I was an eminent engineer who ran a large company. He had everything he had wanted. In dreams

Dreaming another life relieved my sense of failure. But in life in dreams there were also difficulties. Tight cash flows, loans, payrolls, problem workers, taxes. Money had, yes, and a lot. I had a beautiful woman,
Ana, whom I only saw at night and some Sundays. But I was happy, that life was a dream, that life was the one I had always wanted, the one that had somehow escaped me.

I had two children with Ana, they were two beautiful children. They went to the best schools. We lived in an exclusive condominium and alternated with people from high society. However, that life despite being attractive is not easy. No one said it is easy to live any life, but living after the constant pursuit of money and luxury is often stressful. Because there is always another who will have more, who will be better. There will always be other bigger companies, other more skilled managers with more beautiful women and more beautiful children. There always are.

Meanwhile, in real life I managed a small appliance store and I married one of the vendors, who left to work at home and take care of the children. My friends and family were normal, the ones I had always had. He did not have large possessions, he lived a day, renting a house. I did not have a car, I was on a motorcycle. I had two beautiful children who went to public schools. All greatness lived in dreams.

I had a friend, Eduardo, to whom I told him about my dream. Ana always wondered. Once we got drunk celebrating her birthday at a strip bar and said I do not know whether jokingly or seriously, that he masturbated reminding Ana, my wife dreams. I looked at him seriously and told him that I did too. We both laugh like idiots and applaud euphorically the nudist on duty. A totally fictitious woman had entered the mind of an outsider.

The years went by and I still lived two lives. Each one with its daily, real and fictitious problems. My real life marriage was taking more or less, but the dream was falling. Ana met another guy and I met another woman. And then it happened that after twelve years of having started dreaming about another life at night, the dream finally became a nightmare. Gone are the successes and the glory. A bad move in the company made her break, Ana left with the other and I was left alone, defeated. My children left with my wife. It was painful to see how he lost everything he had dreamed.

I fell into depression both in dreams and in real life. Now instead of waiting for the night to continue dreaming, I wanted to sleep as little as possible so as not to confront that dream fiction that my subconscious had invented for me. During the day I led a normal life, without much brightness, but lived relatively quiet. At night the situation was distressing. Creditors, courts, my family and my wife against me. I was called a swindler by the press. I had left abundant gray hair in less than a year. It was finished. It seemed that reaching dreams was not how they painted it.

There will be those who think that I am an exaggerator, that after all it is only a dream. Surely they would know what to do in my place, I do not doubt it. The truth is that it happens to me and I do not know how to handle it, I do not know anyone to whom something similar has happened nor do I know where to go. I have never trusted psychologists. The situation got worse, until one day I wanted to end my dream life. It's just a dream, dying there did not mean dying in real life. What would happen to my dreams after the decision bothered me a lot, but I thought that I would dream something else or just stop dreaming. The problems of my dream life worried me during the day and they did not leave me alone.

So in an outburst I took all the antidepressants and painkillers I had at home and I lay down in my bed to wait for the end. I woke up with the idea that tonight was finally going to be free and that I would stop dreaming or dream other things, like all normal people. However, it was not. I do not know which reason Ana returned home and found me lying, dying, and took me to the emergency still alive. I spent a couple of weeks in the hospital, taken care of by Ana. After leaving the hospital I realized that the two lives, that of dreams and day to day life, necessarily had to coexist. There can not be one without the other. I understood that neither in one am I a failure nor in the other am I successful, and that after all dreams, dreams are.