My dreams, mostly turbulent and absurd, are exactly just that. I remember them in spurts - a miracle when I actually do dream, and then I can't remember half of them, and the ones that I do remember I can usually remember in great detail and even feel emotionally connected to that decompressing of my mind.
Have you ever lost something or couldn't figure something out, and then you found the answer within your dream? The watch you had lost the day before, you found in the desk drawer in your dream. A method to the madness of some situation was revealed. The answer to how you were to begin an essay.
Well, I dreamt of Seneca.
It might have been because I reread the entirety of
On the Shortness of Life before the
sea fog drifted in, and that was all.
Or it might have been my mind sorting out my subconscious.
Either way, [in my dream] as I sat directly across from Seneca (in a toga, mind you), he stared into me and said "Therefore,".
It was as though I was supposed to finish his sentence, so I continued with his very own words, "it is better to conquer our grief than to deceive it."
He continues to say:
"For if it has withdrawn, being merely beguiled by pleasures and preoccupations, it starts up again and from its very respite gains force to savage us. But the grief that has been conquered by reason is calmed for ever. I am not therefore going to prescribe for you those remedies which I know many people have used, that you divert or cheer yourself by a long or pleasant journey abroad, or spend a lot of time carefully going through your accounts and administering your estate, or constantly be involved in some new activity. All those things help only for a short time; they do not cure grief but hinder it. But I would rather end it than distract it... Return now to these studies and they will keep you safe. They will comfort you, they will delight you; and if they genuinely penetrate your mind, never again will grief enter there, or anxiety, or the distress caused by futile and pointless suffering. Your heart will have room for none of these, for to all other failings it has long been closed. Those studies are your most dependable protection, and they alone can snatch you from Fortune's grip."
I disagree, my dear Seneca. Because nothing is more real than a human. Let not our grief be squandered by our selfishness to be rid of something. Unless where a "good riddance" is due, oughtn't we equate our grief to past feelings, as a completion of feelings, as a tribute to the sincerity, faith, and genuine quest for an eternity of them. Grieving only attests to the realness, and the
realization that the realness is no longer attainable.
Why do people hold candlelight vigils, wakes, or scatter ashes throughout foreign terrains? Because they are still holding on to the sweetness and realness of what is no longer.
Every occasion calls for a ceremony. Whether that is toasting to a meal of cornflake cereal, listening to the organ playing while the sun sets in a dreamy sky, or the death of something so very near and dear. Because even in the cessation, it still lives on.
Dear Seneca,
Please never enter my dreams or subconscious ever again. I had the most fitful of dreams.
