5:17 a.m.Life's a divine comedy.
A tale told by an idiot.
Not just any idiot.
A very fucking smart one.
Yes, I realise that's an oxymoron. Those are usually the interesting ones.
I finally managed to sleep.
The migraine, however, refused to leave. Fever does strange things to your head. It hands your subconscious a pen and lets it improvise. That's probably why dreams always think they're clever.
I had my own Virgil.
Only he refused to behave like Virgil.
I had my own Beatrice.
She refused to behave like Beatrice.
The dream borrowed Dante's architecture but completely ignored his building regulations. There is something strangely reassuring about dreams that plagiarise the classics badly.
Mine certainly did.
Inferno
Suffering, as it turns out, remains painfully unoriginal. Whenever I grow close to someone, there comes a moment when they truly begin to know me. That is usually the precise moment I retreat. In the dream, this habit became literal. Every step towards someone I loved was followed by two steps backwards until disappointment became geography. Eventually I lost them, and naturally Hell was where I arrived next.
Dream logic has terrible urban planning. What fascinated me most wasn't the fire. It was bureaucracy.
Every corridor looked vaguely familiar, as though Hell had subcontracted its interior design to public administration. Even the signs seemed undecided whether they wanted to point somewhere or simply discourage hope.
For some reason, I remember checking my pockets for a library card.
Dreams never explain these things.
Purgatorio
The headache woke me. I swallowed a pill and negotiated with sleep for another attempt.
Round two.
Kaboom.
I'm trapped inside a forest.
Blink.
Now I'm standing on top of a molehill.
Another blink.
Everything changes again.
Had it not been a dream, I would've assumed reality had briefly forgotten to render the next frame.
Unlike Inferno, this place felt unfinished.
Not empty.
Unfinished.
As though redemption itself were under construction and the workers had gone home for lunch.
I wandered through it, gathering fragments of myself like someone trying to reassemble a porcelain vase after pretending for years that it had never broken.
Perhaps that's why they call it the pursuit of happiness.
Nobody advertises happiness itself.
Only the pursuit.
It's an important distinction.
The treadmill comes free of charge.
Paradiso
You know those dreams where you dream that you're dreaming?
Let's call the second one the Alt-Dream, because my subconscious apparently runs on software updates.
Inside the Alt-Dream, I walked along an impossibly long trail. Cherubs hovered overhead with the confidence of badly supervised toddlers. Somewhere nearby, an orchestra insisted on playing what my dreaming brain confidently identified as The Best of Chopin, despite dreams having a remarkably poor grasp of musicology.
Just as I reached the end
I woke.
Only I hadn't.
I was simply back inside the original dream.
The Alt-Dream resumed exactly where it had paused, as though my subconscious had remembered to save progress.
There she was.
My Beatrice.
She smiled.
She told me to forgive myself.
She told me to begin again.
Most importantly, she told me not to follow her.
"Paradise isn't nearly as literary as Dante made it sound."
I believed her.
(Also, Dante, my friend... Cyrano de Bergerac called. He says your nose remains aggressively memorable.)
She waved goodbye.
I woke.
Actually woke this time.
I stayed in bed for a few minutes, trying to decide which reality had better dialogue.
Perhaps fever dreams are simply the brain tidying up emotions it forgot to file away.
Or perhaps Dante occasionally sneaks into sick people's subconscious to make sure we're still reading him.
Either explanation feels equally plausible.
This wasn't merely a dream.
Nor was it merely Dante.
It was The Divine Comedy after a sleepless night and a migraine.
Which, now that I think about it, is probably just another way of describing life.
A gamble at terrible odds.
One that somehow keeps convincing us to play another round.
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